1. Christ, in determining what should, and what should not, be done on the Sabbath, “was called ‘Lord of the Sabbath,’ because he maintained the Sabbath as his own institution.”
2. “The Sabbath was not broken by the Creator, even at the time when the ark was carried around Jericho.”
3. The reason why God expressed his aversion to “your Sabbaths,” as though they were “men’s Sabbaths, not his own,” was “because they were celebrated without the fear of God, by a people full of iniquities.” See Isa. 1:13, 14.
4. “By the same prophet [Isa. 58:13; 56:2], he declares them [the Sabbaths] to be ‘true and delightful and inviolable.’”
5. “Thus Christ did not at all rescind the Sabbath.”
6. “He kept the law thereof.”
7. “The Sabbath day itself, which from the beginning had been consecrated by the benediction of the Father.” This language expressly assigns the origin of the Sabbath to the act of the Creator at the close of the first week of time.
8. Christ imparted to the Sabbath “an additional sanctity by his own beneficent action.”
9. “He furnished to this day divine safeguards,—a course which his adversary would have pursued for some other days, to avoid honoring the Creator’s Sabbath, and restoring to the Sabbath the works which were proper for it.”
This last statement is indeed very remarkable. Christ furnished “the Creator’s Sabbath,” the seventh day, with “divine safeguards.” His adversary (THE adversary of Christ is the devil) would have had this course “pursued for some other days.” That is to say, the devil would have been pleased had Christ consecrated some other day, instead of adding to the sanctity of his Father’s Sabbath. What Tertullian says that the devil would have been pleased to have Christ do, that our first-day friends now assert that he did do in the establishment of what they call the Christian Sabbath! Such an institution, however, was never heard of in the days of the so-called Christian fathers. Notwithstanding Tertullian’s many erroneous statements concerning the Sabbath and the law, he has here borne a noble testimony to the truth, and this completes his words.