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THE
REPAIRING OF 
SAM
BROWN
AN ADVENTURE IN
TRUTH
IT WAS Monday night, and Mrs. Frank Richards was putting supper
on the table. She was not a little anxious as she anticipated the
homecoming of her husband that evening. His job was hanging in the
balance, and he might appear at any moment and announce that it was all up
and they were to have the miseries of unemployment again. With her hatred
of debt, that unpaid and unpayable account at the grocery made her
shudder; and the grocer was hinting that he would have to have some money
or he could not let them have any more stuff.
The children at
play on the floor only served to remind her that Helen’s little dresses
were few and threadbare, and Junior’s suits were just about worn out. In
spite of all her clever fingers could do in patching, making over, and
turning the insides out, she was ashamed to go out on the street because
of her shabby appearance. And to see how Frank looked when he was supposed
to be dressed would have been laughable if it had not been so pitiable. It
was a good thing he was a mechanic, and a clean pair of overalls would
recommend him to a job as far as clothes were concerned. The rent would
soon be due again, and there was the winter coal. My, if he could only
keep this job for a while anyway, till they could get on their feet again,
how thankful they would be. But small hopes, with such a boss. It looked
like asking God to set a table in the wilderness.
A footfall and a
hurried opening of the door, and there stood Frank in the room. Much
couldn’t be told from his looks, for he was always good humored when he
came home, no matter what had happened during the day. How she admired
this in him. What a husband to have! It made her ashamed of her own
misgivings. His greeting kiss tasted and smelled of auto-oil, but wasn’t
that infinitely better than the smell of liquor and tobacco that he used
to bring home? He romped with the welcoming kiddies a minute, and was soon
taking off another layer of grime at the sink, as they exchanged the usual
domestic and shop news.
When supper was
well under way, he was ready to tell the weightier matters that she was
eager to hear. How had he come out in his argument with Sam Brown!
"You know,
Grace," he said, "when we prayed over the matter this morning we
decided not to let my needing a job be the incentive toward winning a
Sabbath argument with my employer. ‘Win an argument, and lose a friend,’
they say. I had to be mighty careful not to keep my job uppermost in my
mind, much as I need it. I wanted to let the truth be known, and let the
job take care of itself; or better, let the Lord take care of it. Well, I
think He is doing it; but nothing is very definite yet. I’ll have this
week yet, I think, for he is loaded up with work."
"But what did
he have to say? That’s what I want to know."
"Well, he
brought the concordance back, and said he was sorry but it wasn’t much
of a help to them. Then he brought out ten statements for Sunday keeping,
all carefully written on a piece of paper. Here they are. We talked about
some of them as we worked. I could see that he had gotten them from
somewhere, and was not very sure of his ground himself. But say, he knows
a lot more about the subject than he did last week."
Mrs. Richards
read the first of the ten. "What did you answer him about this?"
she asked.
"Well, I told
him the name Jew was not applied to any people till centuries after the
law was given on Sinai, and then it was given to the descendants of only
two of the twelve tribes of Israel who did receive the law at Sinai. Of
course, he meant Israel, not Jew, and that matters little. But I did put
in that the whole Bible was given to the Jews, and Christ was a Jew. Would
we therefore repudiate these? Then, since his statement admits that the
Sabbath given at Sinai was the Saturday Sabbath, I had only to prove that
it was a law, known and kept before Sinai, and that it was not a memorial
of deliverance from Egypt.
"Then I turned
to Mark 2:27, and read, ‘The Sabbath was made for man,’ the very words
of Christ; and emphasized that it was not made for any one nation but for
all mankind. Then I turned to Genesis 2:1-3 and showed him that God made
the Sabbath on the definite seventh day of creation; made it of a section
of time, the most enduring thing known; and gave it to Adam, the father of
mankind. God would not be likely to rest till He had finished His work, so
Me made it on the last day of creation week; and above all days He could
not have made it on the first day, because He had not then done any work
at all to require rest. Exodus 20:8-11 gives the fourth commandment as
saying that they should remember to keep the seventh day, for in six days
the Lord made the earth, and rested the seventh day, and He blessed the
seventh day in remembrance of, or as a memorial of, creation. God
sanctified and hallowed the Sabbath; that is, set it apart for a holy use,
‘made for man.’ Mark 2:27. And naturally, such holy men as Enoch,
Noah, and Abraham must have kept it. I asked him if he thought the other
nine commands were kept before Sinai and are binding on us today, and of
course he said yes. Then why not the fourth? And when he said there was no
record of the Sabbath’s being observed before the law was given to
Israel, I remarked that there was no record either of the Day of Atonement
being kept after the law commanding it was given, but it must have been.
Silences in history usually prove normal law-keeping rather than abnormal
law-breaking.
"But I read to
him from Exodus 5:5 that Pharaoh, before the exodus, accused Moses of
making Israel rest (keep Sabbath) from their burdens; proving that Moses
must have urged them to keep it as a matter of course, or God could not
give them the blessing of deliverance. And in Exodus 16, it is recorded
that before they got to Sinai, God gave them a test on Sabbath keeping,
without letting the people know it was a test; and when some failed, the
Lord asked significantly ‘How long refuse ye to keep My
commandments and My laws?’ (Verse 28), indicating that the Sabbath
command had been common knowledge among them for a long time. And all this
was before the law was given on Sinai. Then I quoted, ‘Sin is the
transgression of the law’ (1 John 3:4), ‘Death reigned from Adam to
Moses’ (Romans 5:14), and ‘Where no law is, there is no transgression’
(Romans 4:15).
"As to the
Sabbath being a memorial of the deliverance from Egypt, I turned to
Deuteronomy 5:15, which he gave to prove this, and read that they were to
remember that they were servants in Egypt, and that God had delivered
them, and ‘therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath
day.’ But I reviewed to him that in the first place God gave the Sabbath
as a memorial of creation and of nothing else, then showed that this
deliverance was an additional reason why they, the Israelites
alone, should keep the Sabbath. And more than that, I showed him that this
same remembrance of Egyptian deliverance was applied to other commands
besides the Sabbath command. In Deuteronomy 24:17-22 they were told not to
pervert judgment, nor take a widow’s garment for security, nor deprive
the poor of the gleaner’s portion in the harvest. Why? ‘Thou shalt
remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt: therefore I command
thee to do this thing.’ Are we to conclude from this that before they
were bondmen in Egypt it was perfectly all right for them to pervert
judgment, and oppress the weak? So Deuteronomy 5:15 does not prove that
the Sabbath was not a memorial and binding on man before the Exodus; for
the Sabbath does not date from the Exodus, but from creation."
"And what did
Sam Brown have to say to all this?" asked Mrs. Richards.
"He said he
hadn’t counted much on that argument anyway; but that number two was
unanswerable. So off and on as we worked together during the day I
proceeded to answer it. He was fair, but I don’t know that I convinced
him.
"Perhaps I
was pretty blunt with him at the start of our consideration of the second
proposition; for I challenged him to produce even one text to prove that
Christ abolished the seventh-day Sabbath at the cross, or that He and His
followers kept Sunday after that in honor of the resurrection. In answer
he read Colossians 2:14-17 about the new moon, a holy day, and sabbath
days being a shadow of things to come, and we should let no man judge us
concerning them; and about blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that
was against us, nailing it to His cross; and also in Ephesians 2:14, 15
where it says He abolished in His flesh the law of commandments contained
in ordinances. But I showed him that on the face of them these
commandments referred to were not the Ten Commandments containing the
Sabbath law, but that they were ordinances, that is, ceremonies, special
sabbath days, ‘beside the sabbaths of the Lord’ (Leviticus 23:37, 38)
and not the weekly Sabbaths of the fourth commandment; that these
ceremonies were types of Christ and pointed forward to the cross, where
the ‘law of Moses’ which after the cross was a ‘yoke of bondage’
(Galatians 5:1-3), because they had served their purpose. But the Ten
Commandments were statements of great principles always true, and did not
deal with shadows of things to come, but the fourth commandment pointed
rather to creation in the past. So it was the laws concerning
circumcision, feasts, and ceremonies that were nailed to the cross, not
the Decalogue. The Ten Commandments form the constitution upon which God’s
government is founded.
"Then I told
him that there was not one text with even a hint of any change of the
Sabbath from the seventh to the first day of the week in honor of the
resurrection. There are only six texts that speak of the first day in
connection with the resurrection (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2, 9; Luke 24:1;
John 20:1, l9) and all these are glaringly plain that Christ was crucified
and buried on the preparation day before the Sabbath, which all Christians
now recognize as being Friday, that He lay in the grave over the next day
Sabbath, and rose the next day, Sunday; that the first day begins after
the Sabbath ends and that the Sabbath is between Friday and Sunday. And
these gospel records were written from six to sixty-three years after the
resurrection, and not a semblance in them of any change or any honor being
placed on the first day of the week. They emphasized Sunday only because
it was the third day after His death, and He had prophesied that He would
rise the third day; and they wanted to show that that prophecy was
fulfilled.
"Sam said that
Christ always met with His disciples on Sunday after the resurrection. I
pointed out that He met with them only three times when we are told which
day of the week it was. The first was the day of His rising and of course
He would meet with them then to announce and prove His return, and it had
no significance as to a Sabbath; the next time was ‘after eight days,’
which very evidently could not have been the next Sunday, when the week
has only seven days; and the next time was the ascension day forty days
after the resurrection, which a little arithmetic will show could not have
been Sunday.
"As to the
example of the disciples themselves, one time after the resurrection they
went fishing on the day they met with Christ, which could not therefore
have been a rest day recognized by them (John 21:1-9). They met in an
upper room on the very day of the resurrection, but ‘for fear of the
Jews’ and because they all lived there (John 20:19; Acts 1:13); not
to celebrate the resurrection, because at that time they did not believe
that He had risen (Mark 16:9-14).
"Then Sam
turned to Acts 20:7 as his strong text. You remember it says that when the
disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached to them; and this
was the first day of the week. I argued that the breaking of bread meant
nothing special, for it was the custom then to break bread daily (Acts
2:46), and whether this was communion or not, it was not always done on
the first day. And nothing is said about this first day being holy. Paul
met then with them because it happened to be his last day with them, as he
was on a journey. If simply meeting with people for a religious service
makes the day a sabbath, then Paul must have made some of the other week
days sabbaths, for a reading of the account of his journeys shows that he
preached whenever it was convenient (Acts 20:13-18).
"Well,
after this he was ready with 1 Corinthians 16:1-3, about taking up a
collection on the first day of the week. At least that’s what they say
it says. But I told him that that was just what it was not, a
collection. Paul was writing that he was coming by that way to get
donations from them to take up to Jerusalem for the poor, and he told them
that on each first day each one was to ‘lay by him in store’ as God
had prospered him. Other translations bear the thought, and the best
commentators agree, that this does not mean a public meeting and offering
on the first day. It means that, after the previous week—ending with the
Sabbath—as past, each was to review his accounts for the past week to
see how God had prospered him, then lay by himself at home an offering in
proportion to his profits. No public meeting there. But even if it meant a
public meeting, it would not make the first day a sabbath.
"Still not
content to give in, Sam brought up Revelation 1:10, which says that John
was in the spirit on the Lord’s day. He said ‘Lord’s day’ was the
name for the new sabbath, Sunday. I asked him how he knew, and he said ‘What
else could it mean?’ I told him it was incredible that a man of his
common sense should conclude that this text referred to the first day of
the week when the text and context do not say so at all, nor infer it.
"Then I read
to him Mark 2:28, Christ is Lord of the Sabbath, making the seventh-day
Sabbath the Lord’s day, for the only Sabbath they knew then was the
seventh-day Sabbath. Also Isaiah 58:13, where the Sabbath of the Old
Testament is called God’s holy day. So John must have been in the Spirit
on Saturday.
"Then I added
that, rather than the early church keeping the first day of the week, and
always meeting on that day, all the records plainly indicate that they met
customarily, both Jews and Gentile believers, on the seventh-day Sabbath
for many years after the cross. This may be read in such texts as Acts
13:14, 42-44; 16:13; 17:2-4; 18:3, 4."
"It seems to
me," observed Mrs. Richards, looking admiringly into her husband’s
face, "that you gave him some powerful Biblical and logical arguments
on his first two unanswerable proofs for Sunday keeping. How did he take
them?"
"He said the
others were just as strong, and that he could depend on them to convince
me. Then I asked him how he could honestly admit that I was right about
these first two, but not think that I would be about the others. If the
other eight proved to be right and these two wrong, would we not be making
the Bible contradict itself, and thus not be worthy of either of us basing
our doctrinal belief on it? I maintained that what I had given him so far
was enough to prove the seventh-day Sabbath, according to his own
admission, and that all other points he had against it would prove just as
weak. But he replied that the only reason I had won was because I am
sharper than he on the use of the Bible; and that the next time he would
turn his preacher on me, and then I would be settled sure.
"I laughed,
and told him to bring along the preacher, and I would be happy to go into
the matter with him also. He glared at me as he walked away, and looked as
if he would like to fire me right then and there."
"I’m afraid
you will get fired when this is over, Frank," said his wife
apprehensively.
"God help me
to give them all the truth first, then," he added earnestly.
CONTINUE
- CHAPTER 3
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