(cont. from previous post)
“Sabbath” sometimes means simply rest, and not specifically the seventh day of the week. It was very common in the 19th century for English speaking people to refer to Sunday as the “Sabbath”. Often Adventists will use quotes from prominent protestant preachers such as Alexander Campbell upholding “the Sabbath” to bolster their publications. Those quotes are wildly out of context, as Mr. Campbell (and others) was demonstrably talking about Sunday, not Saturday. Similarly out of context are the quotes from Catholic publications about “changing” the Sabbath. Yes, Catholics have a different day of the week as our day of rest. This was changed. And yes, the CHURCH made this change. But to a Catholic “Church” means the Church that was established on Pentecost and began with the apostles. To use those quotes to support the Adventist notion that the “Sabbath” (as in the Old Covenant day of rest) was changed by the Church (meaning in Adventist literature, an organization that arose about the time of Constantine) is to misuse them and take them out of their context.
To put the ball back in the Adventist court…
I have asked this before several times on this forum. Not one Adventist has made a reasonable attempt to answer my question.
Please show us where in the New Testament Jesus explicitly commands us to keep the seventh-day Sabbath and that our day of public worship
MUST be on Saturday.
No one is denying we worship on a different day than Seventh-day Adventists, or Jews, or Moslems for that matter.
The problems is Adventists make assumptions about why we worship on a different day. We strongly disagree with their assumptions about the theology and history of Sunday. Adventists seem to think that we are “keeping” the Sabbath on the wrong day. We are saying that Sunday is distinct from the Sabbath. All that was transferred (transferred, replaced, changed, pick your word, there are hundreds of languages) was the principle of regular rest and worship as a moral precept that is spiritually beneficial.
The principle of regular rest and worship is natural, moral law.
The day of the week is arbitrary… How can one day of the week be more “moral” than another…
Adventists say that Christians must “keep” the Sabbath…
Yet… Adventists have no consistent interpretation of what ‘keeping the Sabbath’ means. Some will say going to a park is wrong, while others promote “nature walks”. Some will refuse to swim, while others find Saturday afternoon after church the perfect time for a family outing to the swimming pool. Some say not to buy or sell, yet many on the west coast will go out to eat after church or pick up something from the grocery store, because eating is a ‘necessary’ activity. Adventists where I live wouldn’t dream of being seen in a restaurant on Saturday. The only thing Adventists seem to agree on is that however you observe the Sabbath it
MUST be on Saturday.
Adventists living in the western hemisphere are fairly consistent about observing Sabbath sundown Friday to sundown Saturday… Yet there are many different opinions on exactly when its Sabbath in the North, where in summer and winter sunsets and sunrises are notoriously inconvenient. Adventists in the South Pacific are similarly conflicted. Because of the dateline, Adventists in Hawaii are off to church on Saturday, while at the same time a few hundred miles to the south, on the same line of longitude in Kiribati, Sunday keeping Christians are off to church and the Adventists are having a workday. Some Adventist pastors in the South Pacific in the past, have worshiped on Sunday… but then, there’s nothing to distinguish them from the Sunday keepers, so that solution was dropped…
I point this out for a very important reason. If “Saturday” is an imutable part of the moral, natural law, then there must be some way to find “Saturday”. As I have posted in the past, it can be difficult if not impossible to find “Saturday” with any reliability in some parts of the word, or out of it. Not one Adventist has offered any opinion at all as far as how to tell what day would be Sabbath on the international space station. The tendency of Adventists is to be practical about the international dateline, they keep their Sabbath on whatever happens to be “Saturday” where they are in the world. That seems very reasonable, but it leaves them following whatever civil government is in power where they are as far as what day they worship on. Adventists in Hawaii and Adventists in Kiribati worship on two different days… yet they are on the same line of longitude because the dateline takes a dogleg jog around Kiribati to the south. Does it make sense that the Catholic Church is wrong and Sunday is the “Mark of the Beast” (in Adventist theology), yet the nation of Kiribati can “change” the day of worship by moving the international dateline by a civil decree… And that’s ok? The dateline is an invisible, artificial, and totally man made abstraction remember.
worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/dateline.htm
The international dateline, and the habits of Sabbath keepers who follow the dateline in choosing their day of worship, to me PROVES that there is absolutely NOTHING moral about the day chosen for worship. Why would God give us something impossible to follow with any accuracy? The day of the week is a ceremonial requirement gone with the old law. Specifying a particular day of the week is possible when a Law is intended for a specific group of people in a particular place and time (see SDA2RC’s posts for that information). It makes little sense for a people who will be in places where there are no days or weeks!
(Adventists will argue that Catholics have no problem identifying Sunday, Saturday then would be the day before. The problem with that argument, is that we allow that the Church has the authority to define when Sunday will be observed, something easily accomplished. Sunday on the international space station, is observed according to the standard time adopted for space, based on the line of longitude which goes through Geneva Switzerland. Adventists claim a biblical authority for their day, yet there is no identifiably biblical way to identify the sabbath outside the middle east. There are significant disagreements among Jews as to when to observe sabbath outside of Israel. In the eastern hemisphere, by civil reckoning, Saturday there comes before Sabbath is observed in Jerusalem. In the west, some groups are concerned because of the possibility that the sundown to sundown of the bible refers to the time in Jerusalem, not their local time.)
Why not talk about why you keep Sabbath and we will tell you about why we keep Sunday. That seems more productive. All you seem to be able to say is that we are wrong for worshiping on Sunday. In the old covenant, the Sabbath was about much more than attending a worship service. As I’ve pointed out, the actual commandment says nothing about assembly. Sunday is about much more than a rest day. I quit clinging to the empty shadow of the Sabbath when I saw the beauty of the 8th day symbolism in Sunday. As Christians, the Eucharist and the Resurrection are our focus, not the old covenant or tables of law.
I once had an Adventist relative upset with me. She was so angry she was shaking. She pointed her finger right in my face, jabbing at me to make her point. She said “You are profaning the very LAW OF GOD that he WROTE IN STONE with HIS OWN FINGER!!!” Having had this accusation made to me many times, though not so dramatically, I knew what to answer. I am a Christian and his law is written on our hearts, not on dead stones."
It would seem the Bible supports my view, not my relative’s…
2 Corinthians 3:6-8
6Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
7But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away:
8How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?
To sum up this long post…
Regular rest and worship is a matter of natural law, and making provision for it in Church law AND civil law, is a matter of providing for the public good.
Arguing Saturday over Sunday seems like a matter of the letter over the spirit. Christians have long found meaning in the Christian symbolism of Sunday. Adventist arguments against it always seem to boil down to a narrow legalism that God wants to see us keeping Saturday instead of Sunday as a ‘test’ of our loyalty… Where in the bible do you find that?
God Bless,
MarysRoses
I think your advice to picture Jesus sitting next to us is wise advice!!