Chapter 3 - part 3
"But God
blessed the institution of the Sabbath, not the day; we need
to keep the spirit of it, not the letter.
"All I know is
that God says He blessed the day, ‘wherefore the Lord
blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.’ True, the Sabbath is more than
a mere day; but it is still a very definite day. No other day but the
Fourth of July will do for the anniversary of the signing of the
Declaration of Independence. How can some other day do for the memorial of
creation? As to the spirit and the letter, does keeping a law in the
spirit free us from keeping it in the letter? I thought that keeping it in
the spirit meant keeping it in the letter and even better than the
letter. Keeping the sixth command in the letter would be to refrain from
actually taking a man’s life; keeping it in the spirit would mean that
and also not even hating the man, as Christ said in the sermon on the
mount. Keeping the Sabbath in the spirit means first keeping it in the
letter."
The respectable
gentleman cleared his throat rather vigorously, "Don’t you think we
ought to keep Sunday rather than Saturday because the resurrection is a
greater event in Christian history than was the creation of the
world?" he asked.
"I might if
God had left it to man to decide which is the greater event in history;
but He does not allow human beings to make pronouncements concerning the
nature or time of His institutions; and He has said nothing Himself about
which is the greater. If He had left it to man, some might say the giving
of the law, some the birth of Christ, some the crucifixion, or some other
event was the greatest; and only confusion would result. The fact is, He
placed the memorial of creation on the seventh day, and told us to observe
it; and He placed no memorial on the first day of the week. Then why
should we place one there? To do so is to observe a purely man-made
institution. Besides, we already have a memorial of the
resurrection in the institution of baptism. (Romans 6:1-5.) To keep our
sabbath on Sunday in honor of that event also is to place two
memorials on the resurrection and none on the creation. God doesn’t work
that way. By keeping in mind creation, we also keep in mind re-creation,
the power of Christ not only to create (for it was He who created the
world in the first place, Colossians 1:16, 17) but to convert and save
from sin. Thus the seventh-day Sabbath is an indirect memorial of the
great work performed by Christ in the birth, life, death, and resurrection
of Himself."
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