Question 59

From the beginning of the world—The opening of the book of Genesis contains the account of the appointment of the seventh day of the week to be the weekly Sabbath, and though there is no direct reference to the keeping of a Sabbath in Patriarchal times, yet the repeated reference to a septenary division of time not only among the Hebrews, but also among the Assyrians, Egyptians, Arabians, and Persians, is a remarkable, and on any other theory than that of Scripture, an inexplicable one. In his Antiquities of Israel Ewald says: “Many ancient nations were acquainted with a weekly circle of seven days, which is quite in accord with the fact that such a week is spoken of in the primitive history of Jacob. These traces leave no doubt that the division into weeks of seven days, and all consequent distributions of time, were widely extended over the earth long before the time of Moses.”

The first day of the week ever since the resurrection of Christ—The notorious deterioration and scandalous abuses of the Mosaic Sabbath in the days of our Lord were overruled so as to become a kind of providential preparation for the great change that shortly after took place as to the time and manner of observing the fourth commandment. The Sabbath of Moses was utterly and irrecoverably demoralized. A dense web of foolish, fantastic, and immoral traditions had been spread over it, and had become grave-clothes to the mind and a snare to the conscience. Though our Lord was made under the law, and fulfilled all its righteousness, yet He took pains again and again to break through the puerile, harassing, and demoralizing teaching of the scribes and doctors concerning the Sabbath day. And He who was the Lord of life and the Lord of the Sabbath lay in the grave all that fatal seventh day, and we may say that the dead Sabbath of Judaism was buried beside Him, and, unlike Him, never saw a resurrection. But when He rose from the dead, a new Sabbath, a better rest, a true Lord’s day rose with Him. Our Lord rose from the dead on the first day of the week. For the whole of that week He was again lost to His disciples, but appeared to them again on the first day of the second week, as if to signalize that day and make it memorable. Again, on the day of Pentecost, which that year fell on the first day of the week, when the followers of Christ were all met together in one place, as if it were their peculiar Sabbath, the Holy Ghost fell on them as never before. Our blessed Lord had finished His work. He had entered into His rest from the labours of our redemption; and as the first man began life on the Sabbath day, so the new man in Christ Jesus counted His Sabbath days, calling them by a new name, counted them from the resurrection of Christ, and called them the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath.

Never, perhaps, in the history of any sacred institution did Divine Revelation so clearly devolve her functions on her sister Providence as in the origin and establishment of the Christian Sabbath. There is nothing in this department of sacred studies more striking and suggestive than the kindred and parallel histories of the obsolescent Jewish Sabbath and the new Christian Sabbath during the generations immediately succeeding the resurrection of Christ. The quietness with which that great innovation of the Lord’s day was brought into the Church; the gradual decay of the sacredness that had been divinely and from such an antiquity attached to the Jewish Sabbath; the slow, but at last the complete assimilation by the first day of the week of all that had for so long been gracious, beneficent, and sacred in the seventh; and the consequent bequest to all succeeding times of the Christian Sabbath,—all this is a triumph of providential patience, watchfulness, and wisdom that has never been sufficiently studied or extolled in the Church of Christ.

Questions

1. The Confession calls the fourth a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment. Explain these epithets.
2. Criticise this sapient utterance: The Sabbath, as the Scotch persist in calling Sunday