History of the Sabbath and first day of the week

by John Nevins Andrews

Dr. Nicholas Bound, in his “True Doctrine of the Sabbath,” London, 1606, page 7, thus states the antiquity of the Sabbath precept:

“This first commandment of the Sabbath was no more then first given when it was pronounced from Heaven by the Lord, than any other one of the moral precepts, nay, that it hath so much antiquity as the seventh day hath being; for, so soon as the day was, so soon was it sanctified, that we might know that, as it came in with the first man, so it must not go out but with the last man; and as it was in the beginning of the world, so it must continue to the end of the same; and, as the first seventh day was sanctified, so must the last be. And this is that which one saith, that the Sabbath was commanded by God, and the seventh day was sanctified of him even from the beginning of the world; where (the latter words expounding the former) he showeth that, when God did sanctify it, then also he commanded it to be kept holy; and therefore look how ancient the sanctification of the day is, the same antiquity also as the commandment of keeping it holy; for they two are all one.”

[22] Ex. 20:8-11.

[23] Buck’s Theological Dictionary, article, Sabbath; Calmet’s Dictionary, article, Sabbath.

[24] Ex. 16:22, 23.

[25] John 1: 1-3; Gen. 1:1, 26; Col. 1:13-16.

[26] Mark 2:27.

[27] Barrett’s Principles of English Grammar, p. 29.

[28] Job 14:12; 1 Cor. 10:13; Heb. 9:27.

[29] Dr. Twisse illustrates the absurdity of that view which makes the first observance of the Sabbath in memory of creation to have begun some 2500 years after that event: “We read that when the Ilienses, inhabitants of Ilium, called anciently by the name of Troy, sent an embassage to Tiberius, to condole the death of his father Augustus, he, considering the unseasonableness thereof, it being a long time after his death, requited them accordingly, saying that he was sorry for their heaviness also, having lost so renowned a knight as Hector was, to wit, above a thousand years before, in the wars of Troy.”—Morality of the Fourth Commandment, p. 198.