THE SACRED DAY
‘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.’
I. Whether the patriarchs were or were not commanded to keep the Sabbath is a thing which we can never know; it is no safe foundation for our thinking ourselves bound to keep it, that the patriarchs kept it before the Law was given, and that the commandment had existed before the time of Moses, and was only confirmed by him and repeated. For if the Law itself be done away in Christ, much more the things before the Law. The Sabbath may have been necessary to the patriarchs, for we know that it was needed even at a later time; they who had the light of the Law could not do without it. But it would by no means follow that it was needed now, when, having put away the helps of our childhood, we ought to be grown up into the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. So that the words of the text neither prove us right in keeping the Sunday, nor would they prove us wrong if we were to give up the observance of it.
II. The real question, however, is, Are we right in keeping the Sunday, or are we not right? We are bound by the spirit of the fourth commandment to keep holy the Sunday because we are not fit to do without it. As the change of the day from the seventh to the first shows us what God designed for us, shows us the heavenly liberty to which we were called, so the long and unvaried practice of the Church in keeping the first day holy shows us their sad feeling and confession that they were not fit for that liberty; that the Law, which God would fain have loosed from off them, was still needed to be their schoolmaster. The bond of the commandment broken through Christ’s Spirit was through our unworthiness closed again. We still need the Law, we need its aid to our weakness; we may not refuse to listen to the wisdom of its voice because the terror of its threatenings is taken away from the true believer.
Dr. Thos. Arnold.
Illustration
(1) ‘There is no date to this chapter. There is no date at the beginning; there is no date at the close. It is not said, “The evening and the morning were the seventh day.” Why not? Because all human history is included in that seventh day. The Sabbath of God is still going on.’
(2) ‘God the Father makes Himself an example of Sabbath-keeping for His children. Whatever His seventh day means, it cannot be the ever-shifting sabbath of the Jews, nor the three consecutive seventh days of two men who had been round the earth in opposite directions, and one who had stayed at home.’
(3) ‘The rest of one day in the seven is an absolute necessity for the well-being of mankind. The law of sevens is observed in the functions of the human body. There is a periodicity which will not be ignored. God commanded us to keep a day of rest in seven, because He knew that man needed it; and they argue best for its observance who base their demands on the ground of the primal physical needs of the human body. Besides this, God wished that man should have a respite from the pressure of his toils, that he might lift up his face to Himself with joy.’
(4) ‘It is the institution, not the day, that must be emphasised. Whether we think of the physical, or the mental, or the spiritual results of the observance of the Sabbath Day, we are face to face with one of the fundamental facts of human life. The law of God and the needs of man combine to make observance of the Sabbath an absolute necessity.’
(5) ‘The first Sabbath was the starting-point of the Spiritual period, when the experiment in the Garden of Eden intimated that the reign of revealed religion had begun on the earth. The happy and promising scene of the innocent pair in paradise, and the unhappy subsequent scene of their fall and expulsion from the garden, may be looked upon as the first little seedplot of human souls whereon the Sower went forth to sow, and in which operation He was immediately followed by the enemy, who, with disastrous effects, sowed tares among the good seed. We now live in the period inaugurated by the Seventh Day.’