History of the Sabbath and first day of the week

by John Nevins Andrews

“The word of God commandeth the seventh day to be the Sabbath of our Lord, and to be kept holy: you [Protestants] without any precept of Scripture, change it to the first day of the week, only authorized by our traditions. Divers English Puritans oppose against this point, that the observation of the first day is proved out of Scripture, where it is said ‘the first day of the week.’[437] Have they not spun a fair thread in quoting these places? If we should produce no better for purgatory and prayers for the dead, invocation of the saints, and the like, they might have good cause indeed to laugh us to scorn; for where is it written that these were Sabbath days in which those meetings were kept? Or where is it ordained they should be always observed? Or, which is the sum of all, where is it decreed that the observation of the first day should abrogate or abolish the sanctifying of the seventh day, which God commanded everlastingly to be kept holy? Not one of those is expressed in the written word of God.”[438]

Whoever therefore enters the lists in behalf of the first-day Sabbath, must of necessity do this—though perhaps not aware of the fact—under the banner of the church of Rome.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE SUNDAY-LORD’S DAY NOT TRACEABLE TO THE APOSTLES.

General statement respecting the Ante-Nicene fathers—The change of the Sabbath never mentioned by one of these fathers—Examination of the historical argument for Sunday as the Lord’s day—This argument compared with the like argument for the Catholic festival of the Passover.

The Ante-Nicene fathers[439] are those Christian writers who flourished after the time of the apostles, and before the Council of Nice, A. D. 325. Those who govern their lives by the volume of Inspiration do not recognize any authority in these fathers to change any precept of that book, nor any authority in them to add any new precepts to it. But those whose rule of life is the Bible as modified by tradition, regard the early fathers of the church as nearly or quite equal in authority with the inspired writers. They declare that the fathers conversed with the apostles; or if they did not do this, they conversed with some who had seen some of the apostles; or at least they lived within a few generations of the apostles, and so learned by tradition, which involved only a few transitions from father to son, what was the true doctrine of the apostles.

Thus with perfect assurance they supply the lack of inspired testimony in behalf of the so-called Christian Sabbath by plentiful quotations from the early fathers. What if there be no mention of the change of the Sabbath in the New Testament? And what if there be no commandment for resting from labor on the first day of the week? Or, what if there be no method revealed in the Bible by which the first day of the week can be enforced by the fourth commandment? They supply these serious omissions in the Scriptures by testimonies which they say were written by men who lived during the first three hundred years after the apostles.

On such authority as this the multitude dare to change the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. But next to the deception under which men fall when they are made to believe that the Bible may be corrected by the fathers, is the deception practiced upon them as to what the fathers actually teach. It is asserted that the fathers bear explicit testimony to the change of the Sabbath by Christ as a historical fact, and that they knew that this was so because they had conversed with the apostles, or with some who had conversed with them. It is also asserted that the fathers called the first day of the week the Christian Sabbath, and that they refrained from labor on that day as an act of obedience to the fourth commandment.

Now it is a most remarkable fact that every one of these assertions is false. The people who trust in the fathers as their authority for departing from God’s commandment are miserably deceived as to what the fathers teach.

1. The fathers are so far from testifying that the apostles told them Christ changed the Sabbath, that not even one of them ever alludes to the idea of such a change.