Sacredness of God’s Commandments
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transgress a commandment so solemn and important? Has the Lord
made an exception by which you are absolved from the law He has
given to the world? Are your transgressions omitted from the book of
record? Has He agreed to excuse your disobedience when the nations
come before Him for judgment? Do not for a moment deceive yourself
with the thought that your sin will not bring its merited punishment.
Your transgressions will be visited with the rod, because you have had
the light, yet have walked directly contrary to it. “That servant, which
knew his Lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according
to His will, shall be beaten with many stripes.”
God has given man six days in which to do his own work and carry
on the usual business of life; but He claims one day, which He has
set apart and sanctified. He gives it to man as a day in which he may
rest from labor and devote himself to worship and the improvement of
his spiritual condition. What a flagrant outrage it is for man to steal
the one sanctified day of Jehovah and appropriate it to his own selfish
purposes!
It is the grossest presumption for mortal man to venture upon
a compromise with the Almighty in order to secure his own petty,
temporal interests. It is as ruthless a violation of the law to occasionally
use the Sabbath for secular business as to entirely reject it; for it is
making the Lord’s commandments a matter of convenience. “I the
Lord thy God am a jealous God,” is thundered from Sinai. No partial
obedience, no divided interest, is accepted by Him who declares that
the iniquities of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to the
third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and that He will
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show mercy unto thousands of them that love Him and keep His
commandments. It is not a small matter to rob a neighbor, and great is
the stigma attached to one who is found guilty of such an act; yet he
who would scorn to defraud his fellow man will without shame rob
his heavenly Father of the time that He has blessed and set apart for a
special purpose.
My dear brother, your works are at variance with your professed
faith, and your only excuse is the poor plea of convenience. The
servants of God in past times have been called upon to lay down their
lives in vindication of their faith. Your course illy harmonizes with
that of the Christian martyrs, who suffered hunger and thirst, torture