[Sabbath Controversy #3] A Vindication of the Seventh-day Sabbath, and the Commandments of God

FOURTH AND LAST PILLAR FOR NO-SABBATH, NO-COMMANDMENTS

2nd 2 Corinthians 3 Here is host of second advent believers join in with you, and labor to prove that Paul has certainly and positively abolished the commandments of God. Yes, one of your old correspondents, G. Needham, of Albany, has publicly declared to the world that God told him so. Now if I prove him to have uttered a positive falsehood, I suppose he will still be considered in good standing, as a second advent lecturer and coadjutor in carrying forward this work of heresy. If God ever told him any thing about this text, he did not contradict Paul, who spake by the Holy Ghost. The principal verses to sustain this heresy, are 7,8,11,13,14th, “But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance, which glory was to be done away, how shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? ... For if that which is done away is glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.... And as Moses which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished. But their minds were blinded, for until this day remaineth the same veil, untaken away in the reading of the old testament, which veil is done away in Christ.” Now every Bible student must admit that Paul was contrasting the ministration of the Jewish nation with that of his own, the Gospel ministration, (11th v.) under the two dispensations. If Moses’ ministry was glorious, then is the Gospel much more so. Now that which was to be done away was not the decalogue itself, the ten commandments, but the ministration of it, which was emblematically illustrated by the glory of Moses’ countenance, which was only for the time being. This clause refers expressly to the glory of his countenance, and not to the glory of the law on the tables of stone. So also the clause, “that which is abolished,” does not refer to the decalogue, but to the ministration of Moses, including what he writes to the Hebrews 9:9-11, and 10:1-10; see particularly 9th verse: “He taketh away the first that he may establish the second.” How? Answer - “I will put my law (the same law of the ten commandments) in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.” 8:10, 5-9 Again, “we are not without law to God, but under the law to Christ.” This certainly is the same law and so is the following. “Do we make void the law through faith? God forbid ye, we establish the law.” It is impossible for this to be the law of ceremonies in Moses’ ministration, for what was nailed to the cross, certainly twenty-five years before. Here then it is plain, as in Hebrews 9:4, that the tables of stone, on which was the whole law of God, remained unmoved, to be written on our hearts. No other law of God can be found for this purpose. The 14th verse says, “which veil was done away in Christ.” Again, if the commandments were done away here, how could those “who teach them be of great esteem in the reign of heaven;” and how could they teach them without knowing the words from the decalogue? “The law of grace and the law of Christ” would darken counsel without knowledge. If the tables of stone were done away here, where are the commandments referred to so many times in the new testament for us to keep, and how useless for Christ to come at the first advent and write them in our heart, if they were not to be kept. Now this epistle is dated at Phillippi, A.D. 60; twenty-seven years after the crucifixion. SC3 159.1

The date of the other three Pillars, as stated, are, 1st, Romans 14:5, 6, Corinthus, A.D. 60 2nd, Colossians 2:14-17, Rome, A.D. 64. 3rd, Galatians 2-6, Rome, A.D. 58 Now remember what I stated before, that if the commandments or Sabbath ever were abolished, the proof is contained in these four principal texts or Pillars, and it was all done at the crucifixion or death of Jesus; see Colossians 2:11, “nailing it to the cross,” (in A.D. 33). Now Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was dated at the same place one year before his second letter, A.D. 59 Here he says, chapter 7:19, “circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing but the keeping of the commandments of God.” Again, we will now go to the chapter to which you exultingly point your readers, for the abolition of this same law and commandments, viz. Romans 7:6, “But now we are delivered from the law,” etc. What law? Answer - the very same that you have had to make your four Pillars of, viz. the law of Moses, the Jewish ritual. “What shall we say then, is the law sin?” [You say it is.] Paul says, “God forbid,” and he quotes the tenth commandment to prove it; 7th verse, and then in the 12th directs us to the whole law of God, thus - “WHEREFORE THE LAW IS HOLY, AND THE COMMANDMENTS HOLY, JUST AND GOOD.” Now, I say, here is testimony that all the opposers of God’s law cannot impeach, and it utterly demolishes and overthrows every idea that has been presented for the last fifteen hundred years against the whole ten commandments and law of God. It nails the point down twenty-seven years after the Jewish rites and ceremonials in the law of Moses were nailed to the cross, as you and all of your faith say it was, and fully and clearly sustains all the scriptural arguments herein presented, as in Romans 3:31; 13:8-10, same year, and Galatians 5:14, two years before, and Ephesians 6:2, six years after. You may object to these dates. If they could be altered and carried back twenty years, it would not help your case, for without any date, a child might know that Paul was not even converted to Christianity until years after the ceremonial law was nailed to the cross. SC3 160.1

You may contradict Paul if you will, and call out all your professed second advent adherents and brethren, (whom you say will not see much of any difference on this subject after they have examined the New Testament,) and they will not in the least strengthen your arguments unless G. Needham should come out again and publicly declare that God also told him that Paul’s testimony respecting his law and commandments, was not to be credited. And this he can as readily establish as he can his first blasphemous assertion. You might still go on and contradict James’ perfect, royal law of liberty, whose testimony is to the same point and in the same year, and tell John the beloved disciple also, whose testimony is thirty years beyond James’, that he ought to have called his old commandment, which he received from the FATHER, “which ye have heard from the beginning,” (1st John 2:7, and 2nd epistle, 4-6 verses.) “The law of grace.” because that would eventually be the right name that you should give them in 1847, after you had been designated one of the two great reformers in the world, to give light on the second coming of Christ, and so make him and James, who had heard their Lord declare that he had kept his Father’s commandments; and Luke and Matthew testifying to his declaration that “the law and the prophets hung upon them,” and that the teaching and keeping of them would ensure “great esteem,” and “eternal life in the reign of heaven,” he would most likely have cited you to the epistle again, and said, read your sentence: “He that saith I know him and keepeth not his commandment is a LIAR and the TRUTH is not IN HIM.” SC3 161.1

I should not be at all surprised if you called all this inferential, irrelevant New Testament testimony, because your grand object is to destroy the seventh-day Sabbath. If the Sabbath is not to be found in the commandments of God, then where is it to be found? SC3 162.1

If those to whom I dedicate this work believe that I have proved beyond controversy that the commandments are valid and still to be kept, as the Revelation also teaches, 12:17; 14:12; 22:14; then they are a perfect law, and cannot fail in one point without risking our salvation. Then the seventh-day Sabbath is included or the testimony of Jesus and his Apostle would be false. Again, there is but one Sabbath that was ever required to be kept, in the Bible, and that is SC3 162.2