The Protestants and the Sabbath

Justification by Faith

• • God's law condemns you.

  • You can never fulfill God's law demands: a perfect character.

  • God provides someone that dies in your place to satisfy the penalty for breaking the His law.

  • You are free from comdenation of the law (not from the law) if you trust in His obedience to God's Law.

  • You still need to follow the law by faith in Christ works, not by trusting your righteousness.

  • Love and good works are the necessary consequences of justification even if they are not necessary for justification.

    • "Luther argues that Christ himself, not love, is the form, or the essence, of faith. Love and good works are the necessary consequences of justification even if they are not necessary for justification."

    • Neither love nor good works have justifying power.

Mystery of Iniquity

• • The mystery of iniquity is a man that exalts himself in the spiritual temple of God (the Church)

  • This man of perdition or antichrist is a system and a kingdom.

    • This kingdom emerges from the divisions of the Roman Empire.

    • This kingdom, although little in appeareance, exalt himself against God and His people.

    • This antichrist system does the opossite as Christ, instead of humbling and serving, the antichrist exalt himself as the head of Christianity.

    • This antichrist, son of perdition that makes war against the saints is the papacy.

    • His religious kingdom is called the Great Babylon.

  • This little horn (political and religious power) pretends to change the law of God in particular the sacred times.

Anglicans

• • Isaac Williams (1802 – 1865): "And where are we told in the Scriptures that we are to keep the first day at all? We are commanded to keep the seventh; but we are nowhere commanded to keep the first day .... The reason why we keep the first day of the week holy instead of the seventh is for the same reason that we observe many other things, not because the Bible, but because the church has enjoined it." Plain Sermons on the Catechism , vol. 1, pp.334, 336.

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  • Canon Eyton (1846 - 1908): "There is no word, no hint, in the New Testament about abstaining from work on Sunday .... into the rest of Sunday no divine law enters.... The observance of Ash Wednesday or Lent stands exactly on the same footing as the observance of Sunday." The Ten Commandments , pp. 52, 63, 65.

Methodists

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Clovis Gillham Chappell (1882 - 1972): "The reason we observe the first day instead of the seventh is based on no positive command. One will search the Scriptures in vain for authority for changing from the Seventh day to the first... Our Christian Sabbath, therefore, is not a matter of positive command. It is a gift of the church..." Ten Rules for Living, page 61.

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Charles Buck (1771 – 1815): "Sabbath in the Hebrew language signifies rest, and is the Seventh day of the week... and it must be confessed that there is no law in the New Testament concerning the first day." A Theological Dictionary, Sabbath

Disciples of Chirst

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Alexander Campbell (1788 – 1866): "'But,' say some, 'it was changed from the seventh to the first day.' Where? when? and by whom? No man can tell. No; it never was changed, nor could it be, unless creation was to be gone through again: for the reason assigned must be changed before the observance, or respect to the reason, can be changed! It is all old wives' fables to talk of the change of the Sabbath from the seventh to the first day. If it be changed, it was that august personage changed it who changes times and laws ex officio - I think his name is Doctor Antichrist.'" The Christian Baptist, Feb. 2, 1824, vol. 1. no. 7, p. 164.

Lutherans

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Martin Luther (1483 - 1546): "They [the Catholics] allege the Sabbath changed into Sunday, the Lord's day, contrary to the Decalogue, as it appears, neither is there any example more boasted of than the changing of the Sabbath day. Great, say they, is the power and authority of the church, since it dispensed with one of the Ten Commandments." Augsburg Confession of Faith, Art. 28, par. 9

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John Theodore Muller (1885 - 1967): "But they err in teaching that Sunday has taken the place of the Old Testament Sabbath and therefore must be kept as the seventh day had to be kept by the children of Israel.....These churches err in their teaching, for Scripture has in no way ordained the first day of the week in place of the Sabbath. There is simply no law in the New Testament to that effect" Sabbath or Sunday, pp.15, 16

Presbyterians

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Timothy Dwight (1752 – 1817): "The Christian Sabbath (Sunday) is not in the Scriptures, and was not by the primitive church called the Sabbath." Dwight's Theology, Vol. 14, p. 401.

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Jonathon Edwards (1703 – 1758): A further argument for the perpetuity of the Sabbath we have in Matthew 24:20, Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter neither on the Sabbath day. But the final destruction of Jerusalem was after the Christian dispensation was fully set up (AD 70). Yet it is plainly implied in these words of the Lord that even then Christians were bound to strict observation of the Sabbath." Works of Jonathon Edwards, (Presby.) Vol. 4, p. 621.

Catholics

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Some Catholic scholars have acknowledged that Sunday keeping is based solely on the Roman Church's authority; however, it is not uncommon to find contradictory statements in Catholicism.

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James Cardinal Gibbons (1843 - 1921): "But you may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will not find a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday. The Scriptures enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never sanctify." The Faith of our Fathers, 88th ed., pp. 89.

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Sometimes Catholic doctrine teaches without historical basis that the early Church did not change the Sabbath, but Sunday was a legitimate day of rest. To justify this change, Catholics use the "Eight 'Biblical' Reasons for Sunday Keeping" with its faulty hermeneutics.

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Peggy Frye. "The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “The Church celebrates the day of Christ’s Resurrection on the ‘eighth day,’ Sunday, which is rightly called the Lord’s Day” (CCC 2191). The early Church did not move the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Instead “The Sabbath, which represented the completion of the first creation, has been replaced by Sunday, which recalls the new creation inaugurated by the Resurrection of Christ” (CCC 2190). Sunday is the day Catholics are bound to keep, not Saturday." Catholic Answers: Did the Early Christians Move the Sabbath to Sunday?