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    Open Letters to an Adventist: Is the Sabbath a Ceremonial Law?
    Open Letters to an Adventist: Is the Sabbath a Ceremonial Law?
    Open Letters to an Adventist: Is the Sabbath a Ceremonial Law?
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Open Letters to an Adventist: Is the Sabbath a Ceremonial Law?

    By Michael D. Morrison and Joseph Tkach

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    About this ebook

    In 1999, Ministry magazine, an Adventist publication, published a two-part editorial titled "Why the Seventh Day?" It's a good question. Michael Morrison responded with a letter of his own, praising the author for some points and questioning others. After a reply from the author, Morrison responded with an outline of why he does not think that the seventh day is not commanded any longer. There is also an essay about whether the Sabbath is a moral law, as Adventists claim, or a ceremonial law. How do we define "ceremonial," and did Jesus treat the Sabbath as a moral law? Also included in this e-book is the long sermon by Joseph Tkach, then pastor general of the Worldwide Church of God. It was the "bombshell" sermon that announced that the WCG would no longer be a Sabbatarian church. This is followed by a couple of articles dealing with practical matters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrace Communion International
    Release dateFeb 10, 2014
    ISBN9781310278518
    Open Letters to an Adventist: Is the Sabbath a Ceremonial Law?
    Author

    Michael D. Morrison

    I grew up in a small town in southern Illinois: Sparta. Our family of seven was religious but did not go to church - instead, we had a Bible study at home every week. I eventually began attending a church after I moved away, and then I went to a Bible college, and eventually a seminary. Now I work for Grace Communion Seminary, an online seminary based in Glendora, California. My interests are the Gospels, the epistles and theology of Paul, and ethics.

    Read more from Michael D. Morrison

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      Book preview

      Open Letters to an Adventist - Michael D. Morrison

      Open Letters to an Adventist

      Is the Sabbath a Ceremonial Law?

      By Michael D. Morrison and Joseph Tkach

      Copyright 2015 Grace Communion International

      Scripture quotations in the other chapters, unless noted, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

      Table of Contents

      A Response to Why the Seventh Day?

      Another Letter to an Adventist

      Jesus Kept the Sabbath. Shouldn’t We Follow His Example?

      Mark 2:27 – The Sabbath Was Made for Humanity

      Is the Sabbath a Moral Law or a Ceremonial Law?

      The New Covenant and the Sabbath, a sermon by Joseph W. Tkach

      Should We Move Our Worship Meetings to Sundays? By Joseph Tkach Jr.

      What Do You Mean, Days Don’t Matter?

      About the Authors

      About the Publisher

      Grace Communion Seminary

      Ambassador College of Christian Ministry

      ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

      A Response to Why the Seventh Day?

      Will Eva, editor of Ministry, a Seventh-day Adventist magazine, recently asked an important question in a two-part editorial titled Why the seventh day? (Ministry, July 1999, pp. 4-7, and September 1999, pp. 4-8). His discussion is interesting and worth responding to. Although you can find that article online, I think you can follow the discussion without having it in front of you.

      I commend Eva for asking the question, for not simply relying on his church’s tradition for stock answers and dogma. I further commend Eva for his willingness to go against some of his tradition even in his effort to support the tradition of seventh-day observance. And I commend him for wanting to bring all doctrines into "the light of the arrival of Jesus and the rest He brought, indeed the rest He is through faith" (July, p. 4).

      Eva has recognized that the traditional Adventist approach to such issues as ‘the perpetuity of the law’ simply does not seem, by itself to answer the legitimate, seminal questions posed by the contemporary antisabbatarian initiative (by which he means our denomination as well as Adventists who are moving out of Adventism into independent congregations). He recognizes that his own approach is not traditional Seventh-day Adventist fare. He wants to put the Sabbath into a thoroughly scriptural and new covenant setting (ibid.).

      It seems that the traditional Adventist approach did not address some important questions. The foundation had some pieces missing, even some defects, and it seems that the conclusion now needs to be shored up in some other way. This is a reasonable thing to do when traditional doctrines are challenged, and it is also reasonable for us to assess whether Eva has given adequate answers.

      Even on the first page, Eva assumes rather than proves the permanence of the Decalogue…the perpetuity of the Ten Commandments. This is a common Christian assumption. He gives some support for it in part 2 of his article, but this pivotal point seems more assumed than proved. I will say more about it later. First, I wish to address the Old Testament material he treats in part 1.

      Genesis 2:1-3

      Eva makes these claims:

      • The seventh day has an inextricable connection with creation.

      • The seventh day is tied to an unchangeable historical occurrence.

      • The meaning of the seventh day thus transcends Hebrew history.

      • The seventh day comes before the giving of all law.

      • The seventh day is blessed and made holy by God.

      • The seventh day was made holy before the arrival of sin (p. 5).

      These claims are defensible, but they do not require a Sabbatarian conclusion. The argument is based more on inference than on connections that the Bible actually makes. Genesis 2:1-3 does not call the seventh day the Sabbath. It does not call it a day of rest. God rested on that day, but nothing is said about any need for humans to rest on that day. There is no suggestion that humans are to imitate what God did on any of the days of creation.

      The sixth day, just as much as the seventh, has a connection with creation, the creation of humans, an unchangeable historical occurrence, therefore with a meaning that transcends Hebrew history. The connection of a day of the week with creation carries no weight, since they are all given some connection to creation.

      The fact that God blessed the seventh day is more significant. But we should ask, how were humans supposed to respond to this blessedness?

      Before sin entered, humans lived in a blessed and holy time, in which humans were in a state of peace with God, trustful and obedient. They did not need to labor in the way they later did. They did not need to set aside a day for communion with God, for they had it continually. They did not need a weekly Sabbath until after sin had entered. The first human did not need to rest on the second day of his life. It is significant that the Sabbath, as a command, was not given until after sin entered.

      It is important to distinguish the concepts of seventh day and Sabbath. They were joined in the old covenant, but the Bible does not show that they were joined at creation. I commend Eva for talking of the seventh day (instead of calling it by the later term Sabbath) of creation, but he still expects readers to equate the two. The Sabbath, as a command, is found only in a covenant that God has declared obsolete. When we are discussing whether the Sabbath is commanded today, we must distinguish the command from the day itself. It is only through Moses that God tells anyone to treat this day as different from other days. We should not try to read much-later commands into an ancient Hebrew narrative.

      We can compare two creation concepts: reproduction and Sabbath. The first is commanded in Genesis 1:28; the second is not commanded anywhere in Genesis. Although reproduction is a creation-based command, it is not required for all Christians. Despite this, some people claim that the Sabbath, which is not commanded at creation, is required for all Christians. This is to make exceptions for a command that is clear, and to inflexibly require something that is not clear. The logic of creation command is thereby called into question.

      Eva writes, This prelapsarian [before sin] existence of the seventh day must be allowed at least to call into question the assumptions of a theology that dismisses the seventh day because of its ‘old covenant’ connections (p. 5). But this is confusing the issues. We are not concerned about the seventh day – what we are concerned about is the seventh day as a commanded day of rest. The command did not enter until after sin entered, and it entered as part of the old covenant. That brings us to the next passage Eva discusses.

      Exodus 16:1-30

      Eva sees the following significance in the Exodus 16 manna-Sabbath story:

      • The Sabbath instructions came before Sinai, before the Ten Commandments were given.

      • The wording in Exodus 16 presupposes a certain knowledge of the nature of the seventh day before this event (p. 5).

      • If we question the pre-Sinai Sabbath, we should also question other pre-Sinai morality.

      These arguments have little merit. First, these Sabbath instructions came only a few weeks before Sinai, and the fact that they came earlier is no more significant than the fact that Passover sacrifices were commanded before Sinai, and the Festival of Unleavened Bread was commanded before Sinai, and the consecration and redemption of firstborn animals and humans was commanded before Sinai. All these belong to the old covenant, the Law of Moses, the law given 430 years after Abraham, the law that is now obsolete. There is no theological significance in the few weeks’ difference.

      Second, the wording in Exodus 16 does not presuppose that the Israelites knew anything about the Sabbath before this. Moses simply tells the people to gather twice as much on the sixth day (verse 5), and on the sixth day he tells them that the Lord had commanded, Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord (verse 23). Moses is not assuming anything about what the Israelites know – he is telling them as if they knew nothing about it. Even Eva recognizes this when he writes, It is entirely possible, even likely, that Israel while in Egypt had all but forgotten the Sabbath (p. 5). So where is the presupposing? I think it is in the presupposition that the Sabbath predated Moses.

      Last, Eva suggests that if we discount the pre-Sinai consciousness of seventh day sacredness, we might also question the existence of a pre-Sinai moral heritage in Israelite life behind the other nine commandments (p. 5).

      I am not questioning the validity of the

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