Question:
What is the mark of the beast? Is it Sundaykeeping? Do you teach that it is?
Answer:
We do not teach that Sunday-keeping is the mark of the beast. Many thousands of God’s children have observed Sunday and are keeping it. They have believed and do believe that it is a holy day and that they are glorifying God in its observance.
In this, they are in error. “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.” So the voice of God declared from heaven. So His finger wrote in the very heart of His holy law. The good of all Biblical ages, from Adam to our blessed Lord and His apostles, observed it, and we are over and over assured in the Book of God that His holy law is unchangeable, even to the jots and tittles. Ps. 111:7, 8; Isa. 51:6, 7; Matt. 5:17-20. Thus, God has given us law and example for its observance, and its deeper study will show that it is founded on the eternal principles of the character of God.
Sunday is an interloper. It has neither divine command nor example. By no word of Inspiration is a sacred character for it predicated or assumed. It is one of the “six working days” and no more. Religiously, it is “the wild solar holiday of all pagan times,” dedicated to the worship of the sun, among the seasons and times forbidden by God. It came into the Christian church through that apostasy which should “magnify itself,” and “think to change the times and laws.” Dan. 8:11; 7:25; 11:36-39; 2 Thess. 2:3-7. The Roman Catholic Church declares Sunday-keeping in the church to be the mark of her power to command fasts and holy days. “That the [Roman Catholic] church hath power,” she declares, is proved “by the very act of changing the Sabbath into Sunday” (Abridgment of Christian Doctrine). Protestants have no other authority than that of pagan and papal tradition for its keeping. Yet many have not understood, many do not understand, that they are in error. God blesses them, not because of the error, but notwithstanding the error, for “the eyes of Jehovah run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him.” True service is a matter of love; knowledge is a matter of revelation and instruction. Many know little but love much, and God leads them to greater light and knowledge. It is also sadly true that many know much but love little or not at all. For them, God waits. Unless the heart and affections are yielded to Him to be changed by His Spirit, knowledge will avail nothing, and the light in them will become darkness.
In God’s providence and plan, His great Threefold Message of Rev. 14:6-14 is going to the world to call men from darkness to light; it is going to Babylon to call men from the confusion of cruel dogma and tradition back to the Word of God. Some in every nation, tribe, and people will hear, heed, and do; will return to “the everlasting Gospel,” and be found among those who “keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” Rev. 14:12. Others will abide in Babylon, will in Babylon- commit spiritual fornication by uniting with civil power to enforce the dogmas and traditions of error, among which will be Sunday. Around this, all the union of Church-and-State forces are gathering. This union and consequent conditions between Church and State compose the beast and its image till organized apostasy and Church-and-State tyranny are worldwide. The mark and test of allegiance to this power will be the legal Sunday, the great mark of apostasy, the change in God’s law. He who in the light of God’s Word turns from that light, from that law, from that Gospel and its power to the darkness of tradition and apostasy, to the power of the civil arm, receives in his very worship and yielded allegiance the character of the power he serves. He crowns that with the badge of beast authority, the mark of his servitude, by the observance of Sunday as enforced by the beast and his image, in contradistinction to the genuine service of God in the Sabbath of the fourth commandment.
That is, in principle, the mark of the beast. When men are forced to keep Sunday and persecuted for keeping the Sabbath—the seventh day—we can know that the time of the beast’s mark has arrived. Just at what stage of character development men possess that mark and cut themselves off from God, it is not for mortals to say. Judgment rests with God, not man. It is for us to proclaim the solemn warning against false worship, the dread consequences of sin; to set forth the eternal principles of the true; to plead with men to come to Christ in the faith that changes character; to entreat that Spirit which writes God’s holy law upon the heart, and makes the doing of His every command a delight. But, praise God, the judgment of those who reject His truth rests not with us but with Him.
