p. 136 | HOWARD CROSBY ON THE SABBATH

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 26, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 9

HOWARD CROSBY ON THE SABBATH.

In his seventh and last lecture before the Yale divinity students, Dr. Crosby bears the following good testimony touching the foundation and perpetual obligation of the sacred institution of the Sabbath. We trust they will remember these words when they are brought face to face with the fact that what they are expected to maintain is a human substitute for the divinely ordained day of rest:—

“The Sabbath rests on the fourth commandment. Take away that foundation, and there is no Sabbath, except the vague and visionary one derived from tradition and physiology. Those ‘ten words’ which God wrote with his own finger (whatever that may mean, it certainly is something supernatural), and ordered to be preserved as the central object of care in the innermost sanctuary, could not have been for the Israelites as a nation, but as the church of God. That church is one down to the Judgment day. Those “ten words” are not to be abrogated, but maintained; not always to be shut up in an ark (that would do only when the church was national and local), but hidden in the hearts of God’s people. The Egypt, or house of bondage from which the church escaped, is mentioned in those ‘ten words’—or, rather, in their preface—because the church’s history is one from then till now, and because also Egypt is represented in the inspired volume as the type of that worldly state out of which every renewed soul is delivered by divine grace. ‘The land which the Lord thy God shall give thee’ is declared by the apostle Paul, in the fact of its quotation by him, to have a far more extensive reference than to the land of Canaan, which Israel should possess. So that all the arguments commonly used to relegate the decalogue to the category of old and obsolete Jewish statutes, are valueless. Now, we have the command touching the Sabbath occupying the very center of the sacred document, and containing one-third of the matter of the whole. Is there no meaning in this? Are we to brush all this away with the broom of the ‘new criticism’? Let us adhere to the word, and beware of false lights.”

“The Sabbath is a stop-day. The Hebrew word means ‘rest’ in the sense of ceasing, not ‘rest’ in the sense of ‘lying down at ease.’ The one word is שבת, the other is נוח. It is the day for stopping ordinary labor, for ceasing the earthly work, as God ceased his earthly work, according to a just analogy between things divine and human. Now, this stop-day suggests to the godly mind, as the proper antithesis of earthly work, heavenly work. The holy convocation is a conspicuous feature. The study of divine revelation is another. The two commingled probably formed from the beginning a large part of the Sabbath occupation. Our experience seems to teach that the more of this method of spending the Sabbath is adopted, the better for the people, in keeping them from a vain, wandering abuse of the holy time.”