Objection 39: Seventh-day Adventists insist that a particular seventh day, coming down through from creation in cycles of seven, is the day God blessed and therefore the day that all should keep as the Sabbath. But no one now knows what that day is. Besides, calendar changes have confused the reckoning.
Preliminarily, we would like to ask the objector a question: Why do you keep Sunday? If you answer as Sunday keepers have routinely answered through the centuries, you will say, Because Christ rose on the first day of the week. Then we would ask, “Are you sure that you and your spiritual ancestors have been keeping the particular first day of the week that has come down in cycles of seven from the resurrection Sunday?”
You can hardly answer “no,” for that would indict all your Sunday keeping forebears, including those who sent men men to jail if they failed to give due reverence to Sunday. But if you answer “yes,” you have refuted your own objection—if the first day of the week came down safely through the centuries, then so did the seventh day.
Strictly speaking, we need go no further. We can revisit the question when Sunday advocates say that they are not sure they are really keeping the first day of the week. Yet, so often is this “lost-time” objection made, when all other arguments against the Sabbath are lost, we will give it some attention.
What proof is offered that time has been lost? None. We are simply supposed to believe that in the long ago everybody woke up one morning and decided that Monday was Tuesday, or something like that.
Of course we do not have a history that tells us all that has happened since creation. But we do know that when we come down to the time of Christ's crucifixion “the Sabbath day according to the commandment” was definitely known, and that that day was the day between crucifixion Friday and resurrection Sunday, the seventh day of the weekly cycle. That makes it unnecessary to peer into the vistas of the time before Christ.
And what of the centuries since Christ? What about the calendar change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar? Here are the facts: The Julian calendar had been based upon a year lasting 365.25 days, but this was slightly too long; the real length of a year is closer to 365.2422 days. Over the course of twelve centuries, the calendar had drifted increasingly out of alignment with earth’s orbit of the sun; hence things like the summer and winter solstices were, per the calendar, on the wrong day.
Pope Gregory the XIII’s scientific advisers told him he needed to delete 10 days from the calendar to bring it back into alignment with the heavens. Consequently, the pope issued an edict that 10 days would be omitted from the month of October in the year of the Lord (Anno Domini, [A.D.]) 1582. That year, the change to the new calendar was made in most Catholic Spain, Portugal, and Italy. This is why the present calendar is known as the Gregorian calendar.
The way the change was effected was that Thursday, the fourth of October, was followed immediately by Friday, the fifteenth. The result was that although 10 days were removed from the month, the order of the days of the week was not interfered with. And it is the cycle of the week that measures off the Sabbath day for us.
As the years passed by, the other nations gradually made the change, with those waiting until the 18th century needing to drop 11 days, and those waiting until the 19th or early 20th centuries, 12 days. And every nation, in making the change, employed the same rule of dropping out days from the month without touching the order of the days of the week.
But the case is even stronger than this. Not only was the week not tampered with in the revision of the calendar, but even the idea of breaking the weekly cycle in any way was not thought of. Speaking of the variety of plans suggested for the correction of the calendar, the Catholic Encyclopedia says,
“Every imaginable proposition was made; only one idea was never mentioned, viz., the abandonment of the seven-day week.” - Volume 9, p. 251.
Why should time be lost? Who would want to lose it? Civilization and commerce have existed all down through the centuries, and can we not believe that those who lived before us were quite as able to keep count of the days as we? Surely all wisdom and knowledge is not confined to the present. Furthermore, the accurate keeping of time records is a vital necessity in religious worship, both for Christians and for Jews. Christianity and Judaism have come down through all the centuries since Bible times. They are probably the most definite links binding us to ancient times.
Would it be conceivable that all Christian peoples and Jews would lose the reckoning of the weeks, which would involve confusion for all their holy days? And if such a thought be conceivable, could we possibly bring ourselves to believe that all the Christians in every part of the world and all the Jews in every part of the world would lose exactly the same amount of time? To such incredible lengths must one go in order to maintain the idea that time has been lost!