DAY of DESTINY

CHAPTER VIII: MAN'S GREAT TEST OF OBEDIENCE

                To bring out some points of essential importance to our discussion, let us follow a dialogue that took place in the pioneer days of Seventh-day Adventism in Northern Europe.  One of the interlocutors was a Norwegian-American minister, Elder O.J. Olsen (who died just a few years ago), instrumental in a revival of an old-fashioned, Sabbath-keeping form of Christianity in the Vestmann Islands, as well as in other parts of Iceland.  The other speaker we introduce was the captain of an Icelandic steamer on which Mr. Olsen was traveling.  This captain had just informed the minister that he did not see what difference there could be, to a modern Christian, between keeping the seventh-day Sabbath of the "Jewish" tradition and keeping any other day of the week.  This observation caused the minister to make a little excursion, with a view to clarifying the issue.  He asked the captain a simple question.

                "Do you have any fire emergency system on board this ship?"
                "Certainly."
                "Then you probably also have regular exercises to test the equipment and to train the crew for such an emergency?"
                "Of course."
                "Now, suppose that one week you, as a captain, announce the following:  `On Tuesday night at 8 o'clock all members of our fire brigade are requested to attend a meeting, on the lower deck, for an important drill.'  Well, Tuesday night arrives.  The ship clock strikes eight.  You are there.  But, sad to say, not one single crew member turns up.  A slip of paper has been left on your desk by one of the men, stating that this happens to be his bridge game night.  For fire emergency drills he definitely prefers Fridays.  Another man is reported to have expressed some days ago, in the company of some companions, that he has always adhered to the principle that drill meetings should take place on the first evening of the week.  A third has hinted that Wednesday nights would be a good time.

                "Now, Captain, what is your feeling about this?  Don't you think they may all be right, each one in his own way, considering the matter from his individual point of view?  In fact, is not a Wednesday just as good for that meeting as a Tuesday?"

                "No, Pastor Olsen, not if I have announced Tuesday.  For then I mean Tuesday, not Wednesday or Friday."

                "Well, but frankly speaking, was not your choice of Tuesday somewhat capricious perhaps, after all?  You could equally well have chosen another day, couldn't you?"

                "Maybe, but one day had to be chosen, and someone had to choose it.  Now I do happen to be the captain of this ship.  I have been appointed as its responsible leader.  So the crew member who simply chooses Friday after I have decided Tuesday, must have assumed a dreadful responsibility of his own.  And I should think his choice of Friday is bound to be capricious in a far more serious sense than my choice of Tuesday.  To me this is simply an audacious overthrow of my whole authority.  It is stubborn rebellion against an established order.  It is mutiny. . ."

                The captain was manifestly working himself up into a mood of righteous indignation that was becoming louder and louder in its spontaneous expression.  You might almost imagine that that "mutiny" had already taken place in factual reality on board this very ship, so peacefully sailing on its way between Iceland and Norway one beautiful summer day sometime in the twenties.

                Then he suddenly became silent.  They were both silent for some seconds.  The captain finally looked up with a smile.  It was the smile of one who has had the experience of some weird recognition.  He was just coming back to the reality of this present moment, this present world.

                "Aha, I see the matter we were just arguing about in a strangely different light now.  So this is what you were driving at, Pastor Olsen?  Of course, you are right.  The Sabbath is simply a question of obedience.  It is a matter of submitting unreservedly, unquestioningly to God.  It is a matter of humbly accepting His right to command.  It is a matter of believing implicitly that He is a Person who says something, and means what He says.

                "He is the literal Captain of my literal life, He is a literal Person, ordering things in a literal way, in this literal world of mine.  He must also be a loving Person.  Theoretical rules do not love anybody.  But he loves me, right here in my everyday bustle and busy-ness, he personally cares about what I do, and He pleadingly invites me to come to a literal appointment, an urgent appointment, with Him, the Lord of the universe.  But I simply ignore that appointment.  I turn up on another day, a day of my own choosing.  I am either an obstinate crank or a man who has failed to believe -- to believe that my Lord and Maker is literally there."

                All that man needed in order to have his attitude toward the fourth commandment radically changed was the bright light of Christian realism, dispersing the ghost-haunted semidarkness of his truth-blurring spiritualism.  He needed to see Jesus Christ as the Creator and the great Captain, the God who is a real Person.  What we all need is this transfiguration from wavering doubt to firm belief.  We simply have not learned to take God at His word yet.  Obviously, to our blurred minds, our Creator and Recreator is still a distant, myth-mixed figure.  Therefore even the clearest words and the simplest commands from His lips, turn into vague meaningless metaphors in our ears.

                So the searching question we should ask ourselves as resolutely as possible is this:  Is it logically sensible and ethically right for creatures to treat their Creator the way we do?  Where did you ever see an intelligent and decent subordinate take the clear orders he receives from his commander, and "generalize" them, just tear "the essence" out of them through a process of "spiritual abstraction", make them "free" from every realistic connection with space and time?

                What does that kind of a "liberation" mean, if not a bold attempt to pulverize, or reduce to absolutely naught, both the commands and the commander?  Our Commander is Jesus Christ.  Are we about to simply deny His whole authority and dignity as a real Person?

                This matter of authority and personalism manifestly constitutes an urgent aspect of the fourth commandment.  For please keep in mind this important fact:  for no other commandment of the law is proper obedience so dependent on how the Lawgiver is envisioned:  Is He a real Person (for instance Jesus Christ)?  Or is He "just a general rule"?  Whether that commandment is to be conceived as demanding a literal obedience or just a "spiritual" one, will depend decisively on this one fateful point.

                So it is not strange that a specific description of the Lawgiver Himself, as a Person, is carefully included in the very text of that commandment.  It is a veritable theophany.  The one who, after such a visible manifestation of the character of the Lawgiver, still does not know what kind of Person he has to do with, must be both deaf and blind.

                The point should be well taken, if we refer back to our previous illustrations.  It is a question serious enough:  Was there guilt or innocence in the attitude of the crew members on board that ship?  This all depends on the way their captain could be envisioned.  Was he a man of flesh and blood or was he "just an abstract principle"?

                Now you may object:  Is there more than one way a captain on a ship can be envisioned?

                Obviously there is.  You should not forget that we live in a world where pagan idealism or spiritualism is rank and rampant.  There you must always take into account the possibility of a "double vision".  At least we should not exclude this as a theoretical alternative.  Let us assume that the crew in question -- thanks to the strangely "advanced" spiritually of their cultural environment, their super-idealist view of life, had all reached the fabulous level where men manage the master-stroke of viewing their literal commander as nothing but a pure abstraction, a "spirit" of the highest potency.  And here then you and I should now join them "in theory", play with them, for a brief moment, that fabulous game of pure imagination.  In other words, we should theoretically assume that they were correct in the way they considered their captain as "just an abstract principle", "a spiritual idea", nothing more.  What, then, about the unshakable validity of his demand that they make their appearance punctually and literally at eight o'clock on that Tuesday night?

                The answer, in this theoretical setting, is obvious:  A stringent obedience to the letter of that command simply could no longer be insisted upon.  The command of a commander who merely exists in the world of myths, is itself nothing but a myth.  Who would feel obligated to yield strict obedience to a myth?  Myths are rather subject to spiritual interpretations:  that is, the interpretation given to them in each given case by the expert in mythology.  This is an art, or a series of arts.  The adept in mythological theology, for instance, will inform you how mythical commandments, in his field, are to be interpreted:  They must be interpreted mythically, of course, so if our captain is duly considered as "pure spirit", the commands, also, that he has left behind him, must be subject to a "purely spiritual" interpretation.  And the "spirit" of his message to the crew would have to be given a new reading (reinterpretation), for instance something like this in our special case:  "Come together, my dear spiritual friends, for a fire emergency drill at any time, and in any place you may find this convenient and profitable, in view of your own plans and occupations, and in any form your spiritual insight and individual conscience may deem humanly proper."

                In other words, the meeting could take place on a Thursday just as well as on a Tuesday.  It could take place regardless of time, beyond all narrow pedantic limits of time.

                Notice one thing here:  the finest spiritualization and the grossest demythologization often serve the same shrewd purpose; they both aim at "curing" the childlikeness of the Christian child.  To take orders literally, just as they have been given, is currently regarded as the most hopelessly childish quality with which children anywhere can be contaminated.  (See my book:  God, the Situation Ethicist, same publishers)

                My question then will be one I can hardly formulate too sharply:  Is obedience nothing but "narrowness" and "pendantry"?  Is it just some pitiable outgrowth of "hopelessly childish" minds?  And what about the God who demands such obedience?  Is He Himself just "hopelessly childish"?  Or is He "arbitrary" in the sense of "anti-logical" and "despotic"?

                My simple conclusion can only be that the Lord of the Sabbath is the absolutely Unique and Sovereign One; that is:  the source of all personalism, which is the most glorious and the most inscrutable of all things.  Of course, you and I may have our reasons for not wishing to have Him so personal and so unique.  That is another matter.  But if we let our sound logical sense get the better of us, that is how we are bound to see Him.  If we let what is right prevail -- in the ethical sense, as well as in the epistemological and rational sense - then that is still how we are bound to see Him.  We just cannot desire Him to be otherwise.  For us, a less personal or less unique God would never do.  The perfect fulfillment of our peculiar need is Jesus Christ, Creator and Redeemer, the divinely "arbitrary" One, the One who takes the initiatives no creature could ever take, in whose presence we have one single initiative left:  rest.

                Of course the law as a whole, from beginning to end, reveals just the kind of God we can depend upon and must depend upon, a personally Intervening One, who does every deed he promises and who means every word He says, and, therefore, must be obeyed unquestioningly.  But let us now still focus our attention upon the fourth commandment in particular.  How far is it right to say that the ultimate of this divine uniqueness is embodied in that fourth commandment?  We have just begun to explore its "arbitrary" character, its character of unquestionable obligation.  And now comes the radical question this whole chapter seems to lead up to:  Does that "unquestionability" of the Sabbath commandment, make it man's test of obedience toward God par excellence?

                Notice, I do not say its "non-moral" character.  For frankly, a test of obedience that turned out to be "non-moral" would be a contradiction in terms.  I must definitely reject such a non-sensical suggestion.  The evidence as to whether a command is morally binding, is absolutely not to be sought by asking if its terms are immanent in natural man's "moral substratum".  Let us preserve a decent amount of spiritual

reasonability.  A Christian must cut short any trend of thought that causes him to look upon the concept of natural law with such infatuation.  He must keep in mind the tremendous worthiness of contingency:  The Creator and Redeemer whom we have learned to know, is a God who is not limited by His own universal laws.

                Does God's Contingent Intervention in Man's Personal Life Mean that His Laws of Universal Validity are "Eluded"?

                You may remember what Troeltsch says about the concept of "Contingency" in the history of ideas of the Western World.  A remarkable thing happens, as the influence of Judeo-Christian theism begins to exert its impact on the thought forms of Occidental philosophy:  The term "Contingency" comes to be looked upon in a different way, an astonishingly positive way.  It is now used by ecclesiastical philosophy to express the volitional nature of the Creator.  Personal will is not considered a disgrace any longer.  Even God possesses it.  The God the Bible teaches us is a God who is not limited by universal laws.  According to Troeltsch, that God actually "reveals the most profound elements of His being in the contingency of what eludes those laws."  (See my quotations pp. 31 and 38).

                What Troeltsch here evidently intends to express, is a "new" and admirably positive quality of contingency.  Of course I heartily agree as far as this statement points out the nature of the Bible's God as the personally intervening One, who is never negatively affected by His own laws.  As theologians put it:  God is the autonomous One who is above the laws He has Himself established (auto=self; nomos=law; God is a law to Himself).  On the other hand, I do not feel quite comfortable with Troeltsch's expression:  "the contingency of what eludes those laws."  That might be interpreted in the sense that God, whenever He may happen to be in that kind of a mood, suddenly abolishes the laws He has set up for His kingdom.

                Do we have any evidence, scriptural or otherwise, that this viewpoint is correct?  None that I know of.  No, not even within the realm of His natural laws do I know any case in which this is bound to be the inevitable conclusion.  Or do you perhaps imagine that, in order to prevent some body from falling, in some specific case of emergency, God would simply suspend, temporarily, the whole general law of gravitation?

                I have to dwell upon this subject for a while, because I feel there is a certain "anti-nomian" trend in human reasoning that is rather unreasonable (We seem to be naturally "against laws" in our traditional thinking).  This inherent lack of respect for laws may be the reason why we insist so much on having miracles happen, where God seems to favor a natural process (for instance of healing).  Evidently God has established His laws in order that they should be honored and observed, not in order that they should be despised and broken.  Why do we think that God is so eager to break (abolish) His own laws?  We ought to know that the physical laws are of divine origin, just as much as any spiritual law governing our lives.  Each one of the two categories is a lesson in discipline.  Would it be intelligent pedagogy to take away that lesson as often as possible, by introducing what we sensation-seekers call the supernatural?

                Of course we know very little about the way God deals with the problems we cause in His life.  But let us look for a while at the way we human creatures naturally seek solutions to our own problems:

                When the first astronauts were circling in orbit around the moon, and needed to get out of that automatic circling again, in order to return to earth, how did they manage it?  Was it by annulling the laws of centrifugal force and the law of gravitation (the moon's pull, exerted on a smaller body)?  No, it was by applying the natural force of their own motor.  That intervening power was sufficiently strong to conquer the other powers, although these remained there all the time and had to be overruled through a conscious battle.  But even if they had been able to, would those astronauts have tried to suspend the very laws according to which the forces functioned that kept the space ship circling around the moon?  Of course not.  Why?  It stands to reason that an actual abrogation of the law of gravitation would have had the saddest consequences for the astronauts themselves.  That general suspension of the law of gravitation would also have affected you and me most disastrously.  We enjoy the blessings of that law every moment, don't we?

                We all know one rule of intelligent research:  If several alternatives of explaining a phenomenon present themselves, one should usually choose the simplest one.  And now, what about God and the attitude He is likely to adopt toward what we, from our limited viewpoint, would tend to call the "automatic working out" of inexorably stringent laws, for instance the laws of physical nature?  When He performs what we call the "miracle", what is it that really happens on such an occasion?  Is it to be equated with a downright elusion of the laws in question?  Would that view-point be the simpler one?  And one further question:  If God so easily solves His problem by just eluding in the case of physical laws, then what about His attitude toward the spiritual laws of our being?  Do you see the seriousness of my question?

                After we have seen the way Jesus Christ had to face the stubborn facts of a broken law in the case of man's fall into sin and natural perdition, is it too much if we shy away from speaking lightmindedly about an "elusion" of divine laws?  Maybe in my case it is the linguist's knowledge of the literal meaning of the words that scares me.  If one takes away the prefixes of the Latin verbs "e-ludere", "il-ludere" and "de-ludere", what is the simplex remaining?  It is "ludere".  That means "to play".  Now, everybody knows there is not the same seriousness, or the same stringency, about play as about realistic deeds.  We play games, and sometimes even tricks.  The God of the Bible, however, is not famous for playing either games or tricks.  Evidently neither e-lusion, nor il-lusion, nor de-lusion is in His particular line.  God's specialty is not in playing games, but rather working realities.  When Christ came down to earth and died in man's place-- even the second death with all its horror and hopelessness-- He proved for all times that elusion of the laws is entirely out of the question.  There just is not one bit of evasion or make-believe to be registered in the case of man's redemption through Jesus Christ.  (If the divine laws are just a transcript of God's very character, specific facets of his eternal and inalienable nature, finding an adequate expression through them, then of course the laws themselves must be eternal and inalienable.  So how could they be abolished,--or even broken in a literal sense.  It is the law that breaks you.)

                Our attitude toward the Sabbath, I am afraid, gives a measure of the narrowness of our vision regarding what Christ has done for us.  Just imagine:  the Creator Himself, the Majesty of Heaven, has found it sufficiently urgent and worthwhile, nay absolutely indispensable, to make an emergency descent to one particular creature of His, on a tiny planet called Earth, to save him from misery and death.  In fact, already before there was any problem emerging on Earth, he had come down.  His urgent desire was to have a relationship of sanctification with us; that is the most intimate union known between the Creator and the created ones, the only safe protection from the fall into sin.  So He communicates to man the exact time of the holy rendez-vous He wants to have with him.  Now, would it be reasonable to think that this whole complex of contingent planning, and fulfillment of plans, would tend to make the Sabbath commandment less binding than the other nine to the creaturely person for whom it was expressly devised?

                A Bizarre Manner of Speech on the Part of a Bride-Elect

                Could you imagine a bride saying about her bridegroom:  "He told me to meet him at such and such a time, in such and such a place, and I promised to come.  But now I do not know what to think about all this.  If only I could know for sure whether that appointment is really morally binding upon me!  What troubles me about it is the fact that it has been made so terribly specific.  True, that boy has done everything in his power to make me happy.  And I know how happy he will be to see me at the appointed time.  But, honestly, why should he indicate that specific time and that specific place?  I just cannot bear such specificity.  Why cannot things be kept in a more general setting?  Of course I do want to be married.  But why must it necessarily be at a definite time and in a definite place?  Such fixedness is not quite fair to the scope of freedom which a young girl should have.  There is something so peremptory and narrow minded about it.  I just am not going to be tied by these shackles.  It intrudes upon my personal freedom.  Do not misunderstand me.  I am not against appointments as such.  It is the "time element" and the "place element" I cannot take.  I am obviously not made for such hairsplitting accuracy, such standing upon trifles.  What I am longing for is something more ideal, more spiritual, something enshrouded in the mysteries of a freely floating dream.  To tell the truth, I am afraid I shall have to find another bridegroom.  This one is evidently not my type.  He is too practical and intrusively personal.  He is too much bound up in this-worldly specificities!"

                I should confess at once, I have never heard a girl in love express herself in such terms.  Nor do I expect to experience anything as perverse as that in the future.  But what now about our "Christian" world and its relationship to a personal God, the God who created man and placed a day of holy communion immediately in front of Him:  the Sabbath was man's first new day; let us not forget that.

                This Christendom must have had its sound human sense considerably perverted by certain pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-spiritual ideas about God and the world He made.  It is incredible that any one could succumb to patterns of reasoning as hollow and as piteously unpromising as that.

                Here I feel the urge to close my ears for a while to the weird voice of the "bride", and listen exclusively to the voice of the Bridegroom, the great Lover, the Man of matchless charms.

                This does not mean that I intend to "leave in the lurch" every sober knowledge I possess about the Sabbath as a morally binding commandment.

                No, I shall all the time keep in my ears that authoritatively ringing voice, rolling like thunder from the sanctuary of God's throne.  That sanctuary and that divine throne are realities I do not, either, dare to reduce, disrespectfully, to mere abstractions.  That center of God's judgment throne is a shaking reality whose concrete reverberations cannot be escaped by any human being.

                Deepest down, however, the Sabbath is a touch-stone, testing the very foundation of man's loyalty to God; that is, his love for God.  Still this is not the utmost end of its capacity.  The Sabbath is designed to be more than a test for man, namely a test for God Himself.  For in one way, God is the main One, in this drama of the ages, who is being tested.  He permits an entire world to put to the test His justice, His faithfulness and His love.  And the Sabbath is again the supreme testing ground.  From the beginning, the Sabbath was the capital body of evidence testifying to God's attitude of extreme benevolence toward His creatures.  So it is not a fit of sentimental nonsense when I choose, as my next headline, the following.

  CHAPTER IX: GOD'S LOVE LETTER TO MAN

                Can the Sabbath be qualified in terms apparently as romantic as that without leaving the sober coasts of rock-bottom realism?  To express it leniently:  Is this title line evocative of some childish overstatement?  Well, what do we mean when we say that God decided to meet man on the Sabbath day?  Are we justified in qualifying the Sabbath commandment as a unique "rendezvous"?  The term "a sanctuary in time" is certainly a most exacting one.  Is there any realistic indication that the fourth commandment may be the only one in the decalogue where such an extraordinary encounter between God and man could be perfectly proper, perfectly practicable?

                In this connection, let us consider what M.L. Andreasen states in his book:  The Sabbath, Which Day and Why (1942).

                "Breaking the fourth commandment is not like breaking some of the other commandments."

                Andreasen's idea corroborates what we have arrived at in a previous chapter.  The Sabbath is essentially different, somehow, Breaking it, is not, for that reason, a less serious matter or a less remarkable sign.  Rather the opposite:  a man may commit manslaughter in a fit of anger; he may, as a result of sheer rashness, take God's name in vain; or he may succumb to the temptation, suddenly presenting itself, to yield to some overwhelming sensual passion.  But a failure to keep the Sabbath, according to Andreasen, rarely comes into that category.  Sabbath-breaking does not have the excuse of sudden passion or of inordinate desire.  It is not like most other great sins or destructive habits:

                "It is rather a symptom of spiritual decline, of departure from God, of estrangement from the promise, of a sickly Christian experience."  (Ibid pp. 26-27).

                The long and the short of it is:  Sabbath-breaking is apostasy.  In other words, it is a deep-rooted, long-term thing, a disorder of the chronic type, not the acute, transitory type.  I sometimes try to express the seriousness of it by simply calling the Sabbath a "heart affair".  It is all a matter of the most tender vows of faithfulness ever known to any marriage covenant.

                But, you may eagerly object, what about the individual who today knows nothing--or next to nothing--about any such thing as a Sabbath in this world?  Can he, with any degree of fairness, be branded as an "apostate"?

                No, you are right there, in one sense.  On the other hand, even in this case the statement about deepseated apostasy is perfectly valid.  In the history of this world there is the indisputable fact of a collective apostasy.  As a race we are guilty, heartbreaking guilty, of having" let God down".  And Sabbath-unfaithfulness is one of the conspicuous symptoms of our wicked dereliction.

                I have contended that the Sabbath embodies, as it were, God's determination to cast His lot with man, wholly and fully.  Now, is there any specific evidence that, in the Sabbath commandment, God joins man in a unique way?  That is exactly what Andreasen suggests in the following passage.

                "The Sabbath command is the only commandment in the observance of which God could join man.  It would be highly improper to speak of God as keeping the first commandment:  `Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.'  So it is with the second and the third.  Again it would be highly irreverent to speak of God as keeping the last six commandments.  A moment's reflection will make this clear.  Stealing, lying, adultery, all these have no place with reference to God.  But there is one commandment in the observance of which God could join man:  the Sabbath commandment.  Man can keep it; God can keep it.  Thus the Sabbath is the meeting place of God and man."  (Ibid. p. 32).

                So the uniqueness of the fourth commandment is a mystery indisputably asserting itself.  And it is a uniqueness asserting itself precisely in what I have called God's "coming down".  If He had not come all the way down, man's predicament would have had no solution.  In the New Testament that total condescension on God's part is further revealed in his "coming in the flesh".  The incarnation doctrine is the essence of New Testament theology.  A denial of that doctrine is equated with "non-Christianity".  This is the "spirit of the `anti-Christ'".  I referred to it already in my introduction.  So you know exactly how distant that spiritualism (or spiritualizing away of all concrete reality) is from the Spirit of realism, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the truth.

                "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God:  Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:  And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God.  And this is that spirit of anti-Christ, whereof ye have heard that it should come, and even now already is it in the world."  I John 4:2,3.

                Spiritualizing away the concrete reality of God's coming all the way down, this is the sham spirituality the great adversary has chosen to reduce God's plan of salvation to naught.  Prophetic revelation also describes it as the mystery of iniquity, or the mystery of lawlessness.

                "For the mystery of iniquity doth already work:  only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.  And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:  Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.  And with all deceivableness and unrighteousness in them that perish, because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved."  2 Thess. 2:7-10.

                It is the denial of the bodily "coming down" of a personal God, that encourages man in his natural inclination toward lawlessness.  At the same time this is a denial of God's love for man in the radical sense of His "coming down" as the extremely Humble One.  It is interesting to see that this divine humility is qualified as the "mystery of godliness":  God was "manifest in the flesh" (I Tim 3:16).  This is, of course, in all respects the diametrical opposite of the spirit of the "man of sin", "the son of perdition:, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God" (2 Thess. 2:3,4).  Titanism and super-man pride is the essence of the "mystery of iniquity" (lawlessness), the "lying wonders" of vain spiritualism, cited above.

                This brings us still closer to the mystery of Pan-sabbatism, the phenomenon we can fully expose only at a later stage.  So far we may anticipate the following:  The Sabbath commandment, taken in its entirely (and that is, of course, the way all real things should be taken), constitutes a striking "coming together" of two things one seldom thinks of as fitting together, namely the common and the holy.  These are both embraced by the very text of the commandment.  For notice that it does not only say:  Keep the Sabbath holy.  No, it continues by pointing out what should fill the first six days:  "Six days shalt thou work."  So it commands man to do and refrain from doing.  Neither part is looked upon as unworthy of being mentioned in the holy text of the fourth commandment.  Again the Christian agape reveals itself as fundamentally different from the pagan eros.  God's philosophy considers as fully respectable the common thing that the philosophy of spiritualism tends to shrink back from as something despicable (bodies, concrete matter, practical everyday affairs).

                Pagan thought here reveals one of its logical fallacies.  And when I say "logical fallacy", you should not think that it is a negligible thing in the world of the spirit.  The evil one prepares his most fateful deceptions by tricks of fallacious logic.  Example:  by totally abolishing in man's world the realm of the "common" or the "profane", the idea of the "holy" is simply made impossible.  Its whole frame of reference, as it were, is suddenly torn to pieces.  For here the "common", of course, is the very setting in which the "holy" finds itself engrained.  If you torpedo the natural setting of the pearl, the pearl itself will of course suddenly be left without foundation.  It will become "homeless", nay, downright meaningless.

                We have pointed this out as a logical self-evidence already:  to "hallow" is to "set apart as holy".  But how can you set something apart if there is not another thing from which it is set apart?  How can you distinguish holy time, if you have no common time from which you distinguish it?  Pan-sabbatism is the shrewd idea of making all days holy.  In its historic appearance and its diabolical effects, we shall show it to be parallel to the machination of pan-theism, the desperate absurdity of making "all things God".  Every bit of matter in the universe is proclaimed divine.  End result:  nothing is God.  Nothing matters anymore!  This is Satan's supreme device of hocus pocus designed to do away with the Holy One, the holy ones.

                Again the tremendous reality of creation, woven inextricably into the very text of the Sabbath commandment, is the basic notion making the whole difference.  Paganism has no idea that God created.  The Bible only, knows the astonishing God who went down.  Went down to what?  To the most lowly things.  He is the incomparable God of the lowly ones.  And this plan of lowliness is the extreme working out of His love.  The eternally Wise One, who has molded true philosophy in every detail, has actually given an infinite prestige to "downness" in this sense.  There is nothing improper or anti-ideal in an intelligent creature's inherent unsightliness, even his total helplessness, without God.  He should only know the fact that he is unsightly and helpless.  That is an integral part of his realism.  The gospel calls that realism the "love of the truth".  It is the realization that dependence on God is the creature's normal position.  It is a great position.  God-dependence is the basic creaturely virtue.  It is decisive for the Creator's own attitude toward the creature, the attitude of benevolence and grace:  "God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble" (I Peter 5:5).  The opportunity to see someone else above oneself, to seek "another's wealth" (I Cor. 10:24), the better honor of the other one, this is looked upon as a joy, the thing one loves to do.  No wonder that Biblical realism is called the love of the truth.  The emotions, as well as the intellect, is here fully involved.

                Conclusion:  The Sabbath commandment puts the things in their right places.  It gives wisdom to distinguish between the great and the greater, between the common and the holy.  Such wisdom is without bias, without pride and vanity.  It is realistic. 

CHAPTER X: THE INTIMATE CONTENT OF THE "LOVE LETTER"

                We have stressed the Sabbath commandment's character as an absolutely free and spontaneous initiative on the part of a living God to step all the way down to man's world, making personal interference in his everyday life.  But how could we account for this initiative if not precisely in terms of a positive interest of God in man, and let us add:  His interest in man as an individual, a creature considered in the full context of his destiny.  This is the Genesis record's graphical portrayal of man coming to life in an environment minutely prepared for him.  It is precisely in that same context that the Sabbath, as well, makes its majestic entry, isn't it?

                Now mention must be made of a remarkable trend implicitly contained, and sometimes even explicitly stated, in traditional Western theology, regarding the fourth commandment, as compared with the other nine:  it is assumed to be more "legalistic" in its formulation; that is, "less expressive of Christ's peculiar love for humanity."  This is sometimes a main argument advanced for considering it "of an inferior order".

                What an adulteration of the plainest facts!  I could hardly think of a more eloquent example than this strangely biased statement, to illustrate a peculiarly sentimental conception of Christian love.  That is a sentimentalism I have found to be the inevitable companion of spiritualistic trends of thinking in whatever culture such spiritualism jeopardizes the sound equilibrium of human hearts.  Those who imagine that this romantic sentimentality is a "Christian" feature, are heirs of a tragic misconception.

                Let us have a closer look at the sentimental objections brought up against the Sabbath commandment:  "It is a stern command.  It shows us a majestic Potentate, who has unfolded a tremendously impressive bulk of realistic power.  He is the origin of all things.  Granted, then, that He has the right to command--to be "arbitrary", to be obeyed, and admired even.  But what kind of obedience and admiration is this?  It seems to be a legally binding kind.  But where do we there find the properly loveable One, the God whom we are bound to love, simply because we are irresistibly attracted by His loveableness?"

                This may seem a most reasonable and legitimate question:  Is the picture the Sabbath commandment suggests of God, just an "admirable" one, but not necessarily a "loveable" one?  If this, however, is immediately meant as a certain charge against God and against His commandment, then it is a premature charge.  The error we commit is that we do not read the Sabbath commandment with caution and care.  We might as well charge the portrait Christ Himself draws of the divine character, right in the New Testament, with being devoid of loveableness; for, in point of fact, the Christian love concept (agape), distinguishes itself by a veritable Old Testament realism.  There is something extremely sober-minded and serious about that portrait, which will never be palatable to the humanistic romanticist.  The New Testament agape is as free from sentimental romanticism as anything you might come across in any text of "the Law and the Prophets".

                But for this very reason the Christian love motif is so blessedly unbiased and many-sided, so absolutely sound and invigorating in its totality, so definitely sufficient for men's salvation.

                As God intervened in man's life and destiny by introducing His first Sabbath, there was no trace of anything arbitrary in this, in our modern Machiavellian sense:  That is, the sense of "despotic" or frigidly "automatic", or fatefully "irrevocable".  It was not in this inhuman sense God suddenly "took a fancy" to man, and made him His particularly selected one.  No, it was with an undertone of trembling tenderness--and a remarkable delicacy of respect for the created person's own autonomy and moral freedom.  This is, in fact, the most delicate appeal imaginable, on the part of a Creator, to His beloved creature, not to leave out of the account of his life the Sabbath day.  I have dared to try and make a paraphrase of what I personally feel God is here saying to Man:

                "Dear Man:  Let me confide a secret to you, a tender urge from the depth of my fatherly heart.  Your life is an essential part of my happiness.  You will never realize to the full how dearly I love you.  That was the reason why, from the beginning, I longed to appoint a most special rendezvous with you.  Every seventh day my soul was filled with joyful expectancy at the thought of meeting with you in quite a special way.  This was in order to show you, my special friend, that I, the great Yahweh, am also the loving Emmanuel, the Father who cannot bear being separated from His child.  That is also why I am the God who interferes, interferes quite specifically and personally in the deepest life of my human creature.

                So do understand this, my dear child:  anything less than that special rendezvous would leave me an unhappy Father.  For, behold, I am not at all that vague and misty shadow of a God portrayed by the wily pseudo-spiritualities of this world, more merciless and cruel than any Moloch worship.  The meanest calumny ever launched against me by the arch-deceiver is this "advanced" idea that I am just an impersonal "power" in nature.

                I assure you, dear child, of mine, I am not at all the type of `Creator' evolved pagans will qualify as a mere `principle of evolution', the barren abstraction to which proud and self-sufficient scientist and philosophers have reduced me.  I am not that divine Super-Automaton, a God in the abstract, just aimlessly turning his heavy wheel of routine laws--laws exactly like their `divine author'; that is, `as blind as a mole and as unfeeling as a mill stone', entirely deaf to the individual cries of individual men with their individual heartaches.

                On the contrary, no sooner was there an inarticulate cry from your lips, or the most secret sorrow in your heart, than my compassion went out to you from the aching depths of my own heart.  Why was it that so few came to hear that undertone of tenderness in my voice, as it echoes forth between the ravines of the wilderness of antiquity, declaring that I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; that is, the God who never tires of seeking to find and save the individuals, the rare ones that still care to be found and saved.  My compassionate cry through my disciple John is a call for you, quite individually, to come to my Sabbath rest:  `Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me!"

                Well, you say, I know that still, small voice of the loving kindness that saves.  But what conclusive evidence is there that this is identical with the voice of the Lord of the Sabbath?  We do know, from every book of the Bible, a God who is ever anxious to establish, between Himself and man, a covenant relationship of mutual love.  On the other hand, we also know a God who makes His identity known with the sound of the trumpet--and even the sound of rolling thunder-in the fourth commandment.  Is this the same God, or two somewhat different Gods?

                A point that would furnish conclusive evidence would be if we could, right in the midst of the trumpet and the thunder, discern the still small voice of love and tender mercy.  Would it make sense to call the Sabbath, a stern command to implicit obedience, and a tender revelation of mercy,--both at the same time?  A parallel example is found in the disputed case of Christ's vicarious death.

                Did Jesus "Have to Die" to "Pacify God's Wrath"?

                Increasingly insistent voices among us today keep crying out:  "There was just one essential reason why Christ died that ignominious death on the cross.  He was to reveal once-for-all the true nature of the maligned God in front of the universe at large.  God could easily have pardoned human sinners without dying."

                The source of that onesided view is not the Bible.  It is proud pagan humanism.  It is an open rebellion against some fundamentals of divine justice.  Let us here first admit one curious fact:  The whole world seems to be singing the praises of fundamental justice.  But have you noticed one special pattern of justice which the natural human heart is incapable of assimilating?  That is God's own ineffable plan to let the Innocent die in the guilty one's place.  To you and me in our unregenerated state that is felt as an absurdity and an abomination.  What Paul actually says in I Cor. 2:9, (Ref. Is. 64:4) is that this appears like an unheard-of scandal to natural men.  Please read the whole context, including verse 10, where Paul admits that God's children are different.  They can acquire that new pattern of justice (I call it the "Lamb" pattern).  But tell me now, does that demand a new and rather paradoxical type of logic?  By no means.  No more so than the inherent logic of the Sabbath commandment.  But what then could tempt you and me to cover the idea of Christ's substitutionary death with ridicule?  Simply our foolish pride.  And when did simple pride help any man to be more logical?  (See page 53).

                Is it realism that teaches me to drown my own feeling of responsibility for Christ's death in the general knowledge that all the angels as well needed to have God's true character revealed to them through that same death?  This important topic demands a thorough treatment in another place.

CHAPTER XI: THE SABBATH COMMANDMENT—A CALL TO MERCY

                We may first be satisfied with some kind of circumstantial evidence.  By this I mean, in the present case, indicative passages in other parts of the Holy Scriptures, referring to the Sabbath.  A key text in this respect is Ezekiel 20:12, stating (expressly) the great goal of God's special appointment with men in terms of Sabbath holiness:

                "Moreover also I gave them my Sabbath--to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them."

                Where, indeed, does the peculiar love of this intensively personal God for His elect ones reach its point of culmination?  Precisely in His fatherly determination to sanctify them.  That sanctification (setting apart, or sacred particularization) of a chosen people (a "handpicked" people) is clearly the glorious aim and the whole significance of the Sabbath in both Testaments.

                Here we have arrived at an extremely important point.  Attentive observers, laymen as well as theologians, have stood back in awe and wonder at the attributes of God, as He reveals Himself in the Old and New Testament.  He is the God who insists on making His intelligent creatures holy.  Some have called it God's passion for holiness, His passion for making those around Him like unto Himself; that is holy--nothing short of this!

                What does sanctification here mean?  What is it God so "passionately" insists upon in this case?  His plan for the intelligent creature is unmistakable and inescapable:  Man should, day by day, reflect God's own image, more and more.  And now, if you ask what "God's image" stands for in this context, then I can give only one answer I find entirely meaningful:  It is God's supreme gift to men:  We have been esteemed worthy of being real persons like Him--endowed with freedom of will, that is, the freedom to serve, without restraint, of our own accord, the other ones--the Other One; that is a service of love.  That divine gift of personalism, means that the recipient can enjoy, in the depths of his mind and heart, something otherwise unheard-of in the world of earthly creation:  an ever increasing consciousness (some languages use "conscience" to describe the same great reality).  And to be intensively conscious here means to be increasingly conscious of the other ones, the Other One.  It means to be lovingly aware of them as the core reality of your environment, the wonderful world of solidarity and totality in which the Creator has been pleased to place you.  In many cases this consciousness is bound to become identical with compassion.  To be like God is to be compassionate, full of pity, filled to the point of overflowing with the desire to help the helpless ones.  The ever increasing intensity of that fellowship feeling is what testifies to our being on the road toward likeness with God.  If we fail to possess this tender awareness of the other ones, the Other One, we should not flatter ourselves that we are on the road of sanctification.  Only the God who commands us to have that awareness, that tender attitude of the deepest agape, is also able to help us to appropriate it in our inmost lives.  And He will not be satisfied with us till He has had His way.  Let us make no mistake on that point.  Without sanctification intelligent creatures, endowed with freedom of will, just cannot be considered safe in the Kingdom of God.

                I think we have now already said clearly enough what that irrepressible divine urge for sanctification is.  It is nothing less than God's agape, the Christian love.  It is nothing but the Lord's boundless well of loving kindness, of tender mercy, something the world apart from Christ never knew.

                And then comes the crucial question of critical verification in our present case:  Does tender mercy characterize the Sabbath commandment?  Does this mark its essence more than any other quality?  And notice:  here we are not satisfied with "mercy" in terms of some mystic hidden interiority which does not come out.  Oh no, mercy in God's sense is characterized exactly by this peculiar practical quality:  it does come out.  It is alterocentric.  It is out-going, even down-going (condescending).  So our questioning regarding the nature, the essence, of the Sabbath goes on:  Does that assumed mark of penetrating love and mercy constitute something that visibly and tangibly manifests itself, even in the concrete wording of the commandment under debate?

                Yes, yes, yes!  Definitely so.  Agape is the fundamental motif of the fourth commandment.  And that love which the Bible, and the Bible only, tells us about, is no invisible abstraction.  It is no intangible specter of theoretical interpretation.  No - no, it is love incarnate.  We should all know the significance of incarnation in the simple philosophy of the Bible.  Mercy, in the Biblical sense of God's incomparable agape, is a living reality, a thing of flesh and blood.  Mercy is a wonderfully visible and tangible thing.  It is simple and sober-minded like a sound child.  It is practical and efficient like the unique God of the Bible, whose love burst out into creation and re-creation.  Mercy is alterocentricity itself.  It is the divine urge that gives itself-unreserved to the other ones, even the downmost other ones.  But the new thing I here want to stress and demonstrate is this:  That mercy is the theme par excellence of the 4th Commandment.  You may fear that I am here indulging in something like an overstatement.  And you are somewhat surprised maybe at the peremptoriness of my statement.  For, off hand, you may not perhaps particularly recall that the fourth commandment has any direct reference to any detail of that order.

                  Well, that is just what I feared.  In this respect, your experience is not so far from mine.  So what we need, both of us, is a new experience.  Let us go hunting for it together.  We may need visions of reality we have not had heretofore.  Hence also the title suggested by a sympathetic reader of the first edition of my manuscript for this book:  A New Look at the Sabbath.

                So let us go straight to the matter.  In this case that would mean confronting the most basic text presenting the Sabbath as a commandment to men.  We cannot escape Exodus 20:8-11, then, can we?  So be vigilantly attentive now.  We shall take it word by word.  And whenever we come to any point in this commandment where the talk is clearly and unmistakably about mercy, as a command to man, then you call out:  "Stop, here it is!"  Of course, if during our experiment you do not have any genuine encounter with "mercy" in that text, at all, then you just keep quiet.  Here we go then:

                "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.  Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work:  But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.  In it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates.  For in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day:  whether the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it."

                So where does the direct command, to you and me, to exert an attitude of tender mercy toward "the other ones", actually start here, in a conscience-stirring way and right to the point?  Well, the command breaks forth of course already with the first word:  "Remember!"  That is a shaking imperative, isn't it?  But where does it come down to the nitty-gritty of an ethical obligation toward your fellow-creatures, a command to be merciful toward them in your treatment of their lives?  That obviously starts right in the midst of a sentence in verse 10:

                "...nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates." Those are "the other ones", the fellow creature toward whom a certain attitude is commanded.

                At this point I should make a full confession of my own narrow mindedness or willful obstination, or whatever you would like to call it.  I had been calling myself a Seventh-day Adventist for several decades before I become really aware that here, right in the midst of the Sabbath commandment, there suddenly turns up a tremendous call to mercy.  I may as well make my confession complete:  I actually happened to be called a Professor of Theology and Christian Philosophy in the Theological Seminary of a Seventh-day Adventist university, before the light of this simple fact dawned upon my mind.  In fact, I had even been entrusted with teaching a special subject in that university called "Doctrine of the Sabbath".

                By the way, I may tell you at once that this is one of the most difficult of all subject to teach in that Seminary.  Why?  Maybe partly for this reason:  Seventh-day Adventist students of theology may tend to have made up their minds in advance that this is one of the easiest subjects.  They are tempted to take it for granted, as it were, that they know that one, inside and out.  And their credulity here may not be so astonishing.  Year after year they have heard it repeated usque ad nauseam:  at home during worships, in Sabbath school, in church grade school, in academy, then in college:  Sabbath, Sabbath, Sabbath, the same thing over and over again.  Finally some of them arrive in the Theological Seminary to go through their Master of Divinity program.  And again they face, as a core curriculum item of their study something called:  "Doctrine of the Sabbath".  Here then it may be tempting for them to ask "Are we to pass through the same old theme again?  We should soon know these things by now, even down to the minutest details." And we teachers,--are we always so much wiser?  We seem to be saying to ourselves:  "I ought to be somewhat of an expert in this field now.  And so are my students.  We ought to be able to skip the elementary grounds.  At least I shall avoid reading the fundamental texts about the Sabbath this time!"

                So we just run the risk of skipping Exodus 20:8-11, as a "commonplace", something we should all "know by now".  Is this an attitude we are justified in taking?  Do we know the 4th commandment so extremely well?  The fact is, perhaps, that we do not know it at all, not even the basic elements of it.  At least I did not.

                But then, what did I know, or think I knew?  How did my confused mind conceive of those crucial words:  "nor thy son, nor thy daughter," etc.?

                Once more I should be 100 percent honest and confess.  Maybe from childhood on the idea at the back of my mind was something like this (I shall not embellish it in any way):

                "Oh, there He is popping up again, that stern God of the Hebrews with His threatening voice of rolling thunder.  In His fourth commandment He is aiming at keeping me down more efficiently than ever.  Not only does He see to it that I am kept away from my own dear occupations one-seventh part of my time, and from any bit of material profit I might be assumed to derive from such occupations on the Sabbath day; but He has even expressly cut me off from any gain that might be imagined flowing in upon me from the work performed by other people, working for me while I am `resting'.  No, not even the scanty income an ox or a donkey might theoretically manage to produce in my behalf, is He willing to let me have.  I wonder if perhaps He goes to the length of begrudging us the milk produced by our cows, through their "Sabbath-breaking" activities on that special day, at least to the extent that such milk production might make our wallets more voluminous?"

                Did you ever tend to understand Exodus 20:10 in something similar to this trend of thought?  At least, the God then conceived of is definitely the God of Marcion, the rebellious theologian of old, who hated the Creator-God of Genesis and the Lawgiver of Exodus?  The way we sometimes tend to feel and think about the essence of the Sabbath commandment might suggest that we are not very far from emancipated humanist theology, ancient and modern.  That the Lawgiver in this case should really have the well-being of the ox or the donkey at heart, that idea hardly occurs at all to many a spiritual "marcionist" among us.  Oh no, to our narrow minds it looks as if the one our Lord has His eye upon--and rather threateningly so--is the herdsman, not the herd.  About herds He is assumed to be entirely indifferent.  And, as for the man who keeps the herds, God's main concern is assumed to be that of "keeping him down", of preventing him efficiently from acquiring any extra benefits whatsoever.

                This does not sound too much like "mercy", does it?  The image it gives of God is an image of utter mercilessness, rather.  Strange that we Sabbath-keepers should be among those who malign God with concepts as cruel and blasphemous as that.  But is this way of conceiving Him without any precedence in the history of Judaism and Christianity?  We do have that history in our bookshelves, don't we?  So we should not need to be ignorant about the historical facts.  And now, what does it show about sabbath-observers from times immemorial?  The thoroughly negative view-point seems to have been the popular and the prevailing one all the time.  It is you and me the old Yahweh is keeping His eye upon all the time, one seems to be saying.  It is our "good time" He wants to put to an end?  So He erects His high fences of law around us.  We must be wing-cut, "kept obedient", "kept down" in every possible way, lest we grow too prosperous, too successful, too happy in this world.  Our natural buoyancy and energetic self-unfolding must be held in check.  For God is jealous.  And the jealousy He is supposed to entertain, is the pagan one.  That is the only one men are naturally familiar with.  You remember in what sense the Greek gods were jealous.  They were jealous just in the human way.  Is that how we also tend to look upon the God of the Sabbath commandment?  Are we marcionists?  Obviously we do not know the true God of the Bible too well then.

                But frankly, you say, how can we be so sure that it is, on the contrary, the attitude of tender mercy God proclaims as His sacred principle and His peremptory order to us in the fourth commandment?

                In order to make sure about that, it may be useful to go to other Bible texts.  We find a parallel one in the 23rd chapter of Exodus.  I do not say that it is necessary to do that.  Intelligent and unbiased readers may not need that at all.  I myself needed it.  Of course, I ought not to assume that you are as unintelligent and as prone to bias as I am.  But here I shall quote that other text for you anyway.  The first part of it will not impress any one as different at all from the text of the 20th chapter:

                "Six days thou shalt work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest."  (Margin:  "keep the Sabbath") Exodus 23:12.

                And now further:  For what purpose should man rest?  Notice the reason here given to that cattle-raising people, those lowly herdsmen, elected by God to be His peculiar property:

                "that thine ox and thine ass may have rest."

                That is brilliantly clear, isn't it?  Man is required to give practical expression to a spirit of considerateness and mercy toward his "other ones".  To what level of other ones?  The down-most level; that is, as men are known to evaluate "up" and "down".

                So we have had the matter pointed out to us in terms we cannot misunderstand, however dumb we may be, however deaf in our spiritual hearing.  Those "hard" words about "thy son" and "thy daughter", "thy manservant" and "thy maidservant", etc. in the Sabbath commandment, as God put it all down with His own finger, cannot be regarded as hard any longer--I mean "hard" to the minds of ordinary common sense people.  I am not yet speaking about the minds of certain theologians.  But true theology is the "science about God", isn't it?  And now, what does the essence of this text really tell us about the essence of God?

                What a remarkable God!  The God of the lowly ones!  And what an unexpected hard nut suddenly dropping down from the highest branch of the peaceful palm tree and right upon the skull of the modern theologian.  Pagan idealists of all ages and all climes--and particularly the proud humanists of our modern Occidental world--would tend to turn away with amazement and disgust, from such divine lowliness.  This is unique in the annals of the formation of religions in any part of the world.  Think of it:  a God who, right in His most solemn statements of sacred legislation, utters words of merciful concern for dumb creatures, like donkeys and cows!

                In fact, worshipers of the traditional gods in antiquity would think it an unworthy and unforgivable sentimentality, on the part of gods, to worry about the everyday lot of even human beings.  Particularly those men of ancient societies who happened to have the good fortune, themselves, to be free men, would think it infinitely far below their personal dignity to pay any serious attention to the fate of such people whom our present text (Ex 23:12) qualifies as "the son of thy handmaid", and "the sojourner".  What have we to worry about the destiny of slaves and barbarians?

                And do not think, now, that that motley troop of Hebrews, with whom the Lord had to deal in the desert, and later, were so much different from the "pagans" around them in this respect.  Their social reaction was very much the same.  In their natural hearts they had no compassion with the "lower orders".  So most of them undoubtedly felt rather scandalized when suddenly placed face to face with a formulation like this one:

                "Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest:  that thine ox and thy ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger may be refreshed." (Exodus 23:12).

                What strange interests on the part of a God!  Hardly a single one of the nations whom the Israelites met on their way, and were influenced by, was seriously disturbed in their ethical conscience by such thoughts about mercy toward bondmen and strangers.

                Here Old Testament theology already was found to mean a revolution, a total transvaluation of values in the contemporary world.  And we modern men think we have made a tremendous progress in social ethics.  Yet our theologians, right in a so-called Christian environment, seem to be taken by surprise whenever they face the fact of God's merciful concern about creatures as far down in the valley of pain and suffering as the animals!  The fact that God suddenly begins to talk about duties of mercifulness toward them--and this even in the solemn context of the moral law--that comes as something like a shock upon us.

                What is wrong with the animals then, as our culture looks upon things?  What makes them so unworthy?  It is their lack of intelligence, we are told.  Who cares about a "dumb beast"?  Apparently, whatever is "not intelligent" is "no good".  Intelligence is the measuring standard for all prestige.

                How could a beast have any mercy shown to it, in such a pitiless environment?  How could a creature that dares to walk around with an intelligence quotient as close to the bottom line as that, expect to have any attention paid to it at all in such a pitiless intellectualistic culture as ours?

                We sometimes seem to think that the reason why God came down to us--and found it worthwhile to save us--was that we were so admirably intelligent.  But why did he really come down to us?  It was because we were the most miserable, the most pitiable and unhappy creatures in the universe.  Without God we were absolutely helpless.  Therefore-- and for no other reason--did the Merciful One come down.  He simply took pity on us.  This is one meaning of the Sabbath, and not the least important.

                So this is the tender gospel message (and the ringing command) of the fourth commandment:  compassion.  This is the Spirit of Jesus Christ beaming forth from the Sabbath rest.  He is compassionate, so we should also be.  What could be more Christ-centered and Christ-like than that?  It informs us about the love the Creator had for us, and the love we should have for our fellow-creatures.

                In fact, the only thing that changes from Genesis 2 to Deuteronomy 5 is this:  Man's need of love, in the form of tender