Objection 45: The resurrection is the greatest event in the history of Christianity; therefore we keep Sunday. Sabbath keepers are not Christians, because they do not commemorate the great event of Christ's rising from the dead.
Even if we agree that the resurrection is the greatest event in the history of Christianity, it does not therefore follow that the Sabbath of the Ten Commandments should be abolished and Sunday worship substituted in its place.
God has specifically commanded us to keep the Sabbath as a memorial to God’s creation of the world in six days, and His resting upon the seventh day. By contrast, nowhere in Scripture has God commanded us to observe the first day of the week—not as a memorial to the Resurrection nor for any other reason.
If human beings are to decide which is the greatest event and how it should be commemorated, then Sunday sacredness rests upon a human rather than a divine foundation. All that would be needed in order to change the day of worship would be for Christians to agree that some other event is the greatest in Christianity's history.
We frail mortals are not qualified to decide which is the greatest event in human history. The Bible has never pronounced on this question. Furthermore, who are we to say how a holy event in Christ's life shall be commemorated?
An excellent case can be made that the crucifixion was the most important event, for then the world witnessed the supreme example of unselfish love—the Son of God giving His life for a rebellious world. Christianity without Christ’s substitutionary death on our behalf would be meaningless. Should we then keep Friday as our sacred day? And if Christians then proceeded to keep Friday, how could we say they were not as consistent as the Sunday keeper, who attempts to build his holy day on his own view as to which is the most important event in the history of Christianity?
By this logic, a man might keep any one of several days, depending only on his appraisal of notable events, and still be a good Christian. Apparently the only day a Christian must not keep holy is the seventh day of the week. The Sabbath keeper is to have leveled against him the charge that he is not a Christian, because he does not honor the event that the Sunday keeper has decided should be honored, or rather because he does not honor it in the way the Sunday keeper has decided it should be honored.
In reality, God has decided how the death, burial, and resurrection of the Savior are to be commemorated; He has given us the ordinance of baptism, which is intended to commemorate the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. (Rom. 6:3-6) The Sunday keeper has in effect substituted Sunday sacredness for baptism as method of memorializing the Resurrection.
We note that baptism by immersion is the only accurate way to memorialize the death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior. Having substituted their own memorial for the biblically prescribed rite, most Sunday-keeping churches have reduced the rite of baptism to the sprinkling of a few drops of water, a procedure that conveys no idea whatever of baptism into death, or of rising again to walk in newness of life.
Objection 46: Seventh day Adventists make a great point out of the fact that the Sabbath memorializes creation. But we are not so much concerned with creation as with redemption, which is greater. Therefore, we keep Sunday, the great memorial of our redemption.
This objection has much in common with the immediately preceding one, and all that is said in reply to that one is also pertinent here. But the rationale is here carried much further.
Not only is the Bible an inspired book; it is an historical book. Indeed, much of the inspired counsel in that book is presented in a historical framework. Or to use a figure of speech, the Bible is a tall, imposing edifice. The foundation rests in the Garden of Eden, the glittering pinnacle points to Eden restored. The various stories, or levels, of the building represent the different centuries in which God's revelations have been given to men. A great dividing point between foundation and pinnacle is that level where God was revealed in His Son to save men on the cross.
All rests on the foundation; destroy that and the whole structure of revealed truth loses symmetry and beauty, and is ready to fall. To speak literally, all the Bible writers build their images on the assumption, implied or expressed, that man was created and placed in Eden and then fell from his holy estate into sin, which fall is the explanation of all the tragedy of the world. The burden of the prophets in the Old Testament is to present heaven’s plan of salvation, whereby man may be lifted up again, redeemed, and restored to Eden. The burden of the apostles in the New Testament is to announce that what the prophets foretold regarding a Savior had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and that men should believe on His name. The last book of the Bible shows us returning to the blissful abode of Eden.
But what if the Genesis record of man's beginning is a fable? Can that which rests on a fable have more substance or value than the fable? No. The whole Bible loses its rugged historical character, loses its meaning, if the Genesis record of creation is a fable.
Obviously, a person's belief as to the origin of man and of this world is tremendously important. That is why the evolution theory, so largely accepted today in place of the Genesis creation account, has such tremendous religious significance. When the evolution theory was first gaining acceptance, Joseph Le Conte, a university professor, wrote a book entitled Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought, in which he set forth the relation of this new theory to religious belief:
“Its truth or falseness, its acceptance or rejection, is no trifling matter, affecting only one small corner of the thought-realm. On the contrary, it affects profoundly the foundations of philosophy, and therefore the whole domain of thought. It determines the whole attitude of the mind toward Nature and God.” - Pages 3,4.
Just how the evolution theory affects the “attitude of the mind toward Nature and God” is tersely set forth by a spokesman for Bible-deriding skeptics who, significantly, were among the first to accept the theory:
“But-no Adam, no fall; no fall, no atonement; no atonement, no Savior. Accepting evolution, how can we believe in a fall? When did man fall; was it before he ceased to be a monkey, or after? . . . And if there never was a fall, why should there be any atonement?”—Robert Blatchford, God and My Neighbor, p. 159.
The relation of belief in the first chapter of Genesis to belief in all the rest of the Bible was vividly brought out by a writer early in the twentieth century:
“When we found that . . . Adam was not made directly from dust, and Eve from his rib, and that the tower of Babel was not the occasion of the diversification of languages, we had gone too far to stop. The process of criticism had to go on from Genesis to Revelation, with no fear of the curse at the end of the last chapter. It could not stop with Moses and Isaiah; it bad to include Matthew and John and Paul. Every one of them had to be sifted; they had already ceased to be taken as unquestioned, final authorities, for plenary inspiration had followed verbal inspiration just as soon as the first chapter of Genesis had ceased to be taken as true history.” - New York Independent, June 24, 1909.
How evident, then, that the Genesis creation account is the foundation of the whole edifice of Bible revelation. And how evident that when men forget, or deny, creation they open their minds to endless untruthful, unholy theories as to their origin and destiny. The awful account of the descent of men into the pit of pagan idolatry and immorality, as given in Romans 1, would never have had to be written if they had kept ever before their minds the holy record of their origin at the hands of the one and only true God, who is of too pure eyes to behold iniquity.
The evolution theory of our day could never have gained acceptance if men had believed in and kept bright in their minds the creation account of Genesis. There never would have been such an extreme departure from the true God, and such a ruinous plunge into idolatry, if men had not forgotten, and ultimately disbelieved, the heavenly account of their beginnings in Eden.
How important, then, above all else that we should remember creation! How strange if God should not have made careful provision for the keeping of it in mind! But, in fact, God did make exactly such a provision, He created a memorial to that opening event of our history. He set that memorial at the very beginning of man's journey. (Gen. 2:2-3), and when He delivered His one audible, brief address to His people salvaged out of Egyptian idolatry and vice, He called upon them to “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” They were to remember each week that “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.”
Remembering creation, they would remember the God of creation. And remembering the God of creation as holy, and who created their first parents holy, they would constantly see in the Sabbath a sign and a pledge that the God whom they served could sanctify them, make them holy, by creating in them new hearts and right spirits. (See Ex. 31:13; Ps. 51:10.)
Remembering creation, with its beauty and purity and perfection, they would be led to look forward with earnest and contrite eagerness to the coming of Christ, who, by His death and resurrection, would make possible their release from sin and death and their restoration to Eden.
The Sabbath command is part of that great code of laws that is the foundation of morality, and memorializes an event that is the foundation of the whole historical revelation of God's ways toward man. Without the creation truth memorialized by the Sabbath the cross has no foundation and the resurrection no meaning. That is evident.
It is by keeping creation in mind, and the original sinless condition of our first parents, that we give maximum meaning to both the cross and the resurrection. And that is but another way of saying that by keeping the Sabbath, the memorial of creation, we place under both the cross and the resurrection a sure and solid foundation, and allow them their true force and meaning.
We keep the Sabbath because we wish to give greatest glory to God the Father and to His Son, through whom He created all things. We keep the Sabbath because we wish to give greatest glory to the God’s revealed word, which rests upon the foundation of Genesis. We keep the Sabbath because we wish to witness before all men that we are on the side of God against the great apostasy [Modernism, liberalism] that has developed in the Christian church because of the widespread acceptance of the evolution theory.
In the light of these facts, how groundless are the indictments brought against our Sabbath keeping! In keeping the Sabbath, we are not Jews, we are not legalists; rather, we believe wholeheartedly in the entire story of salvation, including the sinless creation, the Fall, Calvary, the Resurrection, and Eden restored at long last! We stand solidly for the Scriptures—and against all doubts and disbelief brought in by the evolutionist and the Modernist [liberal].
With religious bodies on every side of us split asunder by the evolution theory, if not wholly committed to it, Seventh-day Adventists stand solidly for the Genesis account of creation and for the inspiration of the whole Book of God. How could we ever believe in evolution when each week we take a whole day solemnly to “remember” God's awesome act of creation—to “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy”?