The Change of the Sabbath

Origin of Sun Worship

These statements of respectable authors place Sunday in the very earliest ages of antiquity, as a “memorial” of the first form of idolatry among the Egyptians, from whom the Romans and the Greeks largely derived their forms of heathen worship. It is well known that their most famous philosophers went to Egypt to become acquainted with their sacred mysteries. Among the Assyrians and Persians, two other very ancient nations, it is well known that Sabianism-the worship of the sun, moon, and stars-was the most ancient form of religion. Thus sun-worship, with its attendant “memorial,” was struggling for recognition away back in the earliest ages, and that, too, in direct antagonism with the “memorial” of Jehovah’s rest, the Sabbath of the Lord. ChSa 97.4

No one can fully grasp the Sabbath and Sunday question without viewing it in these extended relations. The change of the Sabbath is the result of one of the deepest plans ever conceived by the author of all evil. As the Sabbath is the memorial of God’s creative power, a grand monument of the work which shows his divinity as an omnipotent being, Satan aims against it his most cunning schemes, to set it aside and to put in its place a day which commemorates false worship and apostasy from God. We have seen that the Sunday holiday was regarded throughout the whole heathen world, even in the earliest ages before the exodus from Egypt. ChSa 97.5