A SERMON.
Mark ii. 27:—“And he said unto them, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
The discriminating symptoms of hypocrisy or profaneness in a nation, it has been well said, are, that, by the one, outward ordinances are raised to an exaggerated importance; by the other, they are disparaged, depressed, and set at nought. In the words just quoted, the aim of our Lord appears to have been to put these institutions in their right place,—to enunciate a great principle, by which we could always distinguish between certain moral ends for which man was made, and certain outward appointments which were instituted and made for man. To obey God, to resist evil, to fulfil a providential designation, to strive after nearer conformity to the Divine image, to fit and capacitate the soul for a higher condition of being, these are ends,—man was made for these. But holy times, pious commemorations, solemn assemblies, the temples where we worship, and the sacraments whereof we eat, these are only subsidiary and divinely appointed means; they are not among the final objects of man’s creation. They were ordinances wade for man.
This argument, it will be perceived, would be addressed with much fitness to men, whose error, in relation to the Sabbath, leaned to the side of an over-strained and impracticable severity; and who had just been urging it as a complaint against our Lord’s disciples, that, in passing through a field on the Sabbath-day, they had relieved their hunger by plucking a few ears of corn. These cavillers are reminded, therefore, that, in the economy of salvation, all outward ordinances are to be viewed in the light of things secondary and subservient; their mode of observance to be interpreted in harmony with the ends for which they were ordained; and that, with regard to the Sabbath especially, care must be taken to avoid both the hypocrisy that would make the day to be honoured by a rigid ceremonial exactness, and the presumption that would overlook its eternal sanctity as standing in the will of God. It is in this last view that all the ordinances of religion, when clearly of Divine appointment, acquire a character of deep and momentous interest. Their foundation is in the will of God; but that will, as we know, has, as its ever-guiding and controlling rule, a sacred regard to the highest interests of man. Nothing can be more dishonouring to God, or more untrue, than to speak of outward ordinances as if they were mere arbitrary appointments, without significance and without benefit, as only so many meaningless enactments designed to test the willingness of human subjection; so far otherwise, they are means framed upon a wise and loving regard to all the aptitudes of our moral nature, and calculated, in their reverent use, to help man through all the difficulties of his course and to educate his immortal spirit for the employments of the world to come. The Sabbath was MADE FOR MAN.
Brethren, you are aware of the reasons which induce me, at the hazard of going over much of familiar argument, formally to review the grounds on which we hold that a PROPER MORAL SANCTITY does attach to the Christian Sabbath:—that the institution itself has an origin, an object, a typical significance and value, which are independent of all economies, and will endure to all time; and, therefore, that any nation which shall presume to tamper with its unalterable sacredness, is drawing down upon itself those awful maledictions which, by an undesigned coincidence, have been so often recited in our ears this morning as the just retribution of polluted Sabbaths. [5]
I. In trying to arrive at correct notions upon what may be due to the sacred day, and how far it may be lawful that churches and places of amusement should share its hours between them, our first thoughts are naturally directed to the Old Testament accounts of the Sabbath institution itself. Was its origin paradisaical, or patriarchal, or Levitical? And if it were either of these, were the reasons given for commencing it such as would pass away, when the dispensation under which it was given passed away? This question is important, because there is a current way of speaking of the Sabbath as if it were a mere festival of the Jewish Church, deriving its whole sanctity from the Levitical law, and only taken up by the Christian Church at second hand,—as among the useful things of the old economy which it would be as well to perpetuate, though not one of the binding things we were under any obligation to observe.
Now, to expose the absurdity of this notion, we have only to take the earliest Scripture notices of the institution which come to hand. In the second chapter of the book of Genesis, at the close of the account of the creation, we read,—And on the seventh day God ended his work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all his work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it: BECAUSE that in it He had rested from all his work which God created and made. If this passage stood alone, one conclusion only could be drawn from it; namely, that the institution of the Sabbath succeeded the creation immediately in order of time, and that it was sanctified for reasons which must be binding on all mankind alike. But other notices in the writings of Moses follow, which might seem to militate against this view, and even to favour the erroneous notion I have adverted to, of the Sabbath having only a temporary or dispensational sanctity. Thus, in the thirty-first chapter of Exodus, we read,—Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath throughout their generations for a perpetual covenant: it is a SIGN between me and the children of Israel for ever. Whilst, further, in the book of Deuteronomy, at the fifth chapter, we find Moses exhorting the people to the observance of the holy day, with this added reason: Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and stretched-out arm; THEREFORE the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath-day. Now, whether we are able to give any satisfactory account of these additional reasons for the institution or not, the revealed fact will remain the same,—namely, that the Sabbath was not Levitical in its origin, and was not even first made known to the Jews, at the giving of the law. Nothing can be plainer than that the Sabbath was both known and observed before the Jewish Church had any existence. For, besides the incidental notices both before and after the deluge,—such as Noah sending out the dove again “after other seven days,”—we find the Jews actually keeping a Sabbath in the wilderness of Sin, before the covenant of Sinai had been entered into. Thus, at the giving of the manna, we have Moses saying unto the people, To-morrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord: on that day ye shall not find it in the field: for the Lord hath given you the Sabbath: therefore He giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days:—language plainly implying that, at that time, the Sabbath was an established observance of the religious life. What shall we say, then, of those subsequent reasons for the institution which connect it with a peculiar national covenant? or with the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage? Why, not that they are meant to be reasons for the institution itself, but reasons for a particular time and form of its re-promulgation. The children of Israel, it is to be remembered, had been for several hundred years under captivity in Egypt. Many of their ordinances, it is likely they would have forgotten; and their Sabbaths, it is all but certain, their task-masters would not permit them to observe. On their Exodus, therefore, it became necessary that there should be a formal re-enactment of the holy day; not only by a repetition of those moral considerations, on account of which the Almighty had originally set it apart, but also with a recital of such other arguments as should make the sanctity of the day especially binding upon them as a nation; namely, that in their revived and perpetuated Sabbath, they were to keep up a grateful commemoration of their deliverance from Egypt, as well as behold a standing pledge or seal of the covenant into which God was then entering with his people. To infer that mankind had never observed a day of sanctified rest until the Sabbath was made a sign of the covenant with Moses, would be as unreasonable as the inference that the sun’s light had never been refracted in the rain-drops, until God set his “bow in the clouds,” to be a sign of his covenant with Noah. It pleased God to take an existing moral fact in the one case, as He had taken an existing physical fact in the other, to be a perpetual and visible memorial of his own gracious purposes. And, surely, to the Israelites, in all ages, it must have been a great encouragement to see the promise made unto their fathers guaranteed by a seal, which was honoured as the first token ever made to human kind, and hallowed by considerations which could never change, and never lose their force.
I say never lose their force;—for what could a sanctified commemoration of the rest of the Great Creator, a commanded acknowledgment, from the creatures He had made, of their subjection and dependence, a periodical pause in their other employments that they might hallow and bless his name,—what, I say, could such reasons for an institution have to do with one age more than another, or with one economy more than another? Plainly, the obligation presses equally on the first man Adam, and the last born of his degenerate sons. In this respect, the Sabbath was not made for Noah and the patriarchs specially, to commemorate the world’s second birth; nor for Moses and the Israelites specially, to celebrate the triumphs of the wilderness and the sea. It was made neither for Jew, nor Christian, nor Church, nor age;—The Sabbath was made FOR MAN.
II. Other reasons for the original and indelible sanctity of this institution, I must note more briefly. Thus, what other inference can be drawn from its place in the law of the ten commandments,—that great summary of human duty,—that searching code which, in its Gospel spirituality and breadth, becomes the rule of all outward and inward holiness; that eternal transcript of all creature obedience, which, when heaven and earth shall have passed away, shall stand out as the reflected will of God? Think not, said the Great Teacher, I am come to destroy the law or the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. Will any raise a question as to the law here intended being the moral law given to Moses? or conceding that, will they say that when our Lord declared neither jot nor tittle should pass from this law, He meant to say, men shall keep all the commandments except the fourth?
Again, in contending for the universal obligation to separate a seventh portion of our time to the service of God, we cannot overlook the plain intimations contained in the earliest records of all nations, that, either with religious sanctions or without them, men have observed this weekly division of time. Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, all seem to have known of it;—and the question is how, except as the relic of some universal tradition, those nations should have thought of such a measurement of time at all? For other divisions of time we can find reasons,—obvious, necessary, and natural. The daily rotation of the earth on its axis; the completed cycle of lunar phases; the sun imparting to the revolving worlds the blessings of cold and heat, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, are phenomena quite adequate to explain why we should break up our life into days, and months, and years; but for WEEKS we have no such reason, nor, indeed, any reason to give, except that it is one of the original appointments and laws of God. It is an arbitrary period, the recurrence of which neither nature nor reason seems, in any way, to have marked out for us, but which, on the all-commanding authority of revelation, men have been taught to set apart to sacred remembrances. The Sabbath was MADE for man.