The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 4
VII. Sabbath Issue the Overshadowing Topic
1. SPECIFICATIONS OF THIRD MESSAGE STUDIED
The hour had manifestly come, they believed, to recover all the long-lost, or at least obscured and undeveloped, truths of the gospel. As the Biblical teaching on the Sabbath and the sanctuary in their inseparable relationships became plain, they continued to search for other neglected truths just rising into view. But the specifications of the third angel’s message became increasingly the new focal point of study, the new area of special investigation. Each of its phases and features called for fresh study, and in due time became luminous with meaning—the Beast, the image to the Beast, the mark of the Beast, the futurity of the plagues, the nature of the punishment to be meted out to the sinner, and its duration, and various related features of the final events. PFF4 1041.3
These men of the conferences, delving into the realm of Scripture truth, were seeking to round out the fuller understanding of the “everlasting gospel.” This gospel message had been obscured by the rubbish of error and tradition during that long period when truth was trampled to the ground by the great apostasy seen by Daniel the prophet in his vision of chapter 8. There the inspired record is, “It cast down truth to the ground.” They were now set upon lifting up those truths that had so long been “trodden underfoot.” Their investigative activities must therefore be read in the light of the guiding principles and inner aims that motivated them. They had the pioneer spirit, as they laid the foundations, stone by stone, of a structure that was just beginning to take on fair and harmonious shape. PFF4 1042.1
2. SUNDAY MARK WILL BE ENFORCED BY LAW
They studied most earnestly the meaning of the “remnant” of the “seed” of the “woman,” or Christian church, who would keep the “commandments of God” in the latter times and would have the “testimony of Jesus” in their midst. The trail of opposition by the apostate power that was to “think” to “change the times and the law” of the Most High was to make its last attack upon the “remnant” who were lifting up again the downtrodden law of God. So they were to warn against the presumptuous changing of God’s law and to call back all who would adhere to the New Testament platform—“the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus”—set forth in Revelation 14:12, which was to be restored shortly before the second advent. PFF4 1042.2
Slowly they began to believe that the great papal apostasy, aided by a backsliding Protestantism, would renew the ancient warfare against God’s law and its holy Sabbath. So they studied anew the latter part of Revelation 13, which portrays the effort to enforce the mark of apostasy. Thus Joseph Bates, who in 1849 wrote his pamphlet, A Seal of the Living God, speaking of the enforcing of the “mark,” said: PFF4 1043.1
“This last text is still in the future, and has a direct bearing on this very sealing message. This ungodly power from which God’s people have been called out, (Revelation 18:4,) will yet, as it now appears, enact a law for the express purpose of making all bow down and keep the Pope’s Sabbath, (Sunday).” 27 PFF4 1043.2
The third angel’s message soon became their greatest concern and the field of their most earnest study. PFF4 1043.3
3. CREATION AND REDEMPTION; LAW AND GOSPEL
Believing in God, not merely as a primal cause or as a cold distant judge of mankind, but as a solicitous father, they built their faith upon the Bible record that God created the heavens and the earth literally in six days. That view, universally accepted by Christendom at that time, would erelong be first questioned, then attacked, and finally rejected. But creationism was one of the foundation stones of the Sabbatarian belief. They took their stand upon the Mosaic record of man’s failure and fall, and had no part in that daring assumption—just being formulated—that man, evolving from primitive forms, physically, mentally, and morally, can lift himself by his own power to higher estates. They held that provision for man’s redemption from the Fall is solely through the gift of God’s only Son. PFF4 1043.4
They held the law of God and the gospel of Christ to be in perfect harmony, each necessary and consistent with the operation of the other. They maintained that the law of God is immutable and impossible of abrogation, but that the gospel is provided to rescue doomed man from the effects of sin. They held that the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, is the memorial of a fiat creation and the sign and seal of sanctification as well. PFF4 1043.5
4. HELD TO BAPTISM BY IMMERSION ONLY
In addition to these main positions, they held to the baptism of the adult believer only, by immersion. Rejecting sprinkling and infant baptism as originating in apostate practices, they regarded immersion as the sign of burial with Christ in death to sin and the acceptance of new life in Christ. PFF4 1044.1