Objection:
If Paul were living, he would offer the same condemnation of you that he did of the Galatians in Galatians chapter four!
Answer:
The Galatians passage reads: “But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.” (Galatians 4:9-10).
We have earlier found (see “Paul Proves That We Have Nothing To Do With The Law”) that the yoke of bondage was the endless series of ceremonial rites, particularly because those rites had been heavily encrusted with rabbinical refinements and additions. It is evident that Paul is not here speaking of the moral law, for it deals only with one day, the seventh day Sabbath. He must be speaking of the ceremonial law, for only there do we find commands on how to “observe days, and months, and times, and years.”
How could Paul possibly say that the seventh day Sabbath was one of “the weak and beggarly elements,” and that keeping it would bring men into “bondage”? Paul was the man who instructed Timothy that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16). Therefore, Paul would be guided in his appraisal of the Sabbath by the prophets’ appraisal of it. Isaiah, for example, declares that the Lord calls the Sabbath “my holy day,” and then appeals to us to call it “a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable.” (See Isaiah 58:13).
Christ died on the cross to redeem men from sin and sanctify them, to blot everything that relates to sin from this world, and to restore this world to its original Edenic glory. But why would Christ seek to abolish the Sabbath, which came forth blessed and sanctified from God’s hand in the sinless beauty of Eden (Genesis 2:1-3), was held before God’s people as the sign of His sanctifying power (Exodus 31:12-18), was commended to the “sons of the stranger” (Isaiah 56:6), as well as to the Jews, and will be kept in Eden restored (Isaiah 66:22, 23)? Sabbath objectors make no serious attempt to face squarely this question. We would ask another question: If Paul would indict those who keep the Sabbath, why would he not also indict those who keep Sunday? Is there not as much the keeping of a day in one case as in the other?
But let us take the matter a little further. Paul’s indictment is against those who “observe” various days and seasons, and so on. We are marked by the fact that we do not observe a variety of holy days or seasons, for example, Good Friday or Easter, though we attach vast significance to the death and resurrection of our Lord. We keep only one day holy. Frankly, Paul would not indict us along with the Galatians.
We wonder, however, what he might say if he could speak today to the Sunday-keeping world that is giving ever-increasing attention to a variety of religious days and seasons. One Protestant paper, under the title “The Increasing Observing of Lent,” remarks: “Lent has a most important place in the calendar of the Roman Catholic, the Greek Catholic, the Episcopalian, and the Lutheran Churches,” and then goes on to add that “in our churches there is an increasing acknowledgment of Lent.” Another Protestant paper is not content to promote the observance of Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, Christmas, and Lent but wishes to add another. It regrets that “Ascension Day has not bulked more largely in Christian thought and the calendar of the churches.” The editorial states what it believes the observance of Christmas has done for men, and likewise the observance of Easter and other days, and argues that the commemoration of Ascension Day would further enrich the spiritual life of Christians.
That is the same reasoning that governed the theologians of the Middle Ages when they were adding one holy day after another and building the structure of the Catholic Church that is so sweepingly indicted by God’s prophets. But we are not quoting from a medieval Catholic writer but from an editorial in a twentieth-century Protestant paper, the Christian Statesman. That was the official organ of the National Reform Association, which so earnestly strived to obtain rigid Sunday laws throughout the United States and declared that it spoke for a significant percentage of the Protestant bodies of the country! We believe Paul’s words have a present-day application. As such, we leave the unbiased reader to judge which group would be indicted, us or the great Sunday-keeping Protestant bodies? Since we are often considered defective in our Christianity because we do not observe Good Friday, Easter, the Lenten season, or any special days or seasons, we would ask: Why should we be indicted for not keeping a variety of days and seasons, and at the same time be indicted by Paul as being guilty of that very thing?
