Objection:
By preaching the law, you endeavor to deprive Christians of the glorious liberty of the gospel.
Answer:
Christ declared, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” John 8:34. And what is sin? “Sin is the transgression of the law.” 1 John 3:4. Therefore, the man whose life is not in obedience to the law of God is deprived of liberty. The righteous man willingly obeys God’s law and finds happiness in such obedience.
Law and liberty are not opposite words. You need not surrender one to have the other. True, some men stand up at street corners and declare that the only way to have absolute liberty is to abolish all laws. But as good citizens, we do not take such talk seriously. Instead, we know that laws wisely made and well kept provide the only sure foundation for liberty in any country. Someone has aptly remarked, “Obedience to law is liberty.” This phrase is often found inscribed on public buildings in the liberty-loving United States of America.
In any country, the ones who find in law a curtailing of their liberty are those whose life habits oppose the law. The man accustomed to stealing or murder finds that the law dramatically checks the freedom of his actions.
If, as citizens of this world, we find liberty in obedience to man-made law, why, as citizens of the heavenly world, do we need God’s law abolished to have liberty? Is it because the laws of heaven are unjust and deprive us of the freedom that ought rightfully to be ours? It is blasphemy to utter the thought.
The law of God prohibits making or worshiping idols. No man who calls himself a Christian can feel deprived of liberty by such a prohibition. The law also commands us not to take God’s name in vain or to desecrate His holy Sabbath day. Does the child of God want to be freed from these prohibitions? Likewise, the law commands respect for parents and prohibits killing, adultery, stealing, lying, and coveting. Indeed, no follower of Christ will feel that these precepts deprive him of liberty.
The Bible describes God’s holy law as “the law of liberty.” (See James 2:10–12.) True, if the law is preached to men apart from the gospel–the saving power of God–the result will be only a feeling of condemnation on the hearers’ part. They will be brought to a realization of how guilty they are. But when the high code of heaven is presented in terms of God’s promise to give us His Divine Spirit to carry out the law’s holy requirements, then the hearers can find happiness and liberty in such preaching, for “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” 2 Corinthians 3:17.
No one would ever have thought of bringing against us the charge of depriving men of Christian liberty if it were not that we preach the law precisely as it reads in the Bible. Protestant denominations believe in the law and declare obedience necessary; you can read many of their creeds for reference. They have believed so strongly that the Ten Commandments should be obeyed by all that they have persuaded legislatures in most of the so-called Christian countries to enact statutes for the observance of the fourth commandment, the Sabbath command, as they interpret it.
Why we, who invoke only the grace of God to enable men to obey the command to keep holy the seventh day, should be charged as legalists, while the hosts of Sunday keepers who invoke the strong arm of the law to compel men to rest on the first day of the week, should claim to be the exponents of grace, is undoubtedly one of the strange contradictions in modern religion. We have always been vigorous opponents of the principle of approaching Sabbath rest from a legal standpoint. In contrast, Sunday-keeping preachers are the ones who have lobbied almost every legislative body in Christian lands into passing strong laws to enforce Sunday rest.
Just what is there about preaching first-day sacredness from the fourth commandment–as Protestant denominations, in general, do–that allows them to bask in the warmth of grace, whereas the preaching of seventh-day sacredness from the same fourth commandment consigns such preachers to the cold limbo of legalism? The explanation cannot possibly be found in the theory that we who preach seventh-day sacredness do so more sternly and rigorously than first-day preachers. Even a cursory acquaintance with Protestant history reveals that Sunday sacredness has quite generally been proclaimed with a severity that frightened into conformity the majority and thrust into jail the remainder. If there is a certain relaxation of this severity today, it does not reflect any change of view toward the first day by Sunday-keeping religious leaders. They lament the laxity that has crept in.
When we declare that a specific, definite day has been set apart as holy, we are frequently met with the argument that there is no difference in days in the Christian Era, that it is unreasonable to maintain that a special sacredness or significance attaches to a particular day in the cycle of the week. But evidently, by the actions and statements of Sunday keepers themselves, there is a vast difference in days, so vast a difference that the keeping of one particular day means that you are shackled by legalism, and the keeping of another specific day implies that you roam freely over the vast expanses of grace. We never taught a sharper contrast in days than this.
Therefore, the issue is not whether the Ten Commandments should be obeyed; virtually all Protestant creeds teach obedience to the Ten Commandments. Nor is it a question of whether there is a vast difference in days. Protestants generally believe there is so mighty a difference as to justify civil laws and penalties to maintain the difference. The real question is this: Seeing that the Ten Commandments are in force and there is a difference in days, which day is the right one, the seventh or the first? We have sought to answer that question in many other posts on our website.
