The fact remains that the Lord narrowed down the Sabbath, the 7th day as a sign between him and the nation of Israel, since Exodus 16. The church is not Israel. Israel is Israel, and the Jewish people have been keeping the Sabbath, and not only in the singular but the plural, because the Lord has a lot more than just the weekly Sabbath, since it was given to them by the Lord until this very day, even when they were out of the land, in every land that they sojourned. If you look up "sabbath" in your concordance you will see that the sabbath is never mentioned outside of direct reference to Israel and if you look up "sabbaths" you will see there were a lot more than just the 7th day. So if SDA wants to use the 7th day, then why not the rest of the sabbaths, which were all given to Israel? Not one single time is the sabbath mentioned to the Gentile church other than Col. 1:16 where the Apostle Paul said not to judge a person "in meat or drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days", all of them, "which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is of Christ". The church is not commanded to worship or "assemble yourselves together" on any particular day and that includes Sunday. Since there is no such commandment, nobody has a right to judge anybody else based on when they "assemble" together and worship.
SDA is in direct violation of the admonition of the Apostle Paul who was chosen by Jesus Christ personally as the Apostle to the Gentiles. SDA judges persons by their keeping of the sabbaths, which includes the seventh day sabbath. On top of it all they teach that those who do not keep the Sabbath as they do, will accept the mark of the beast, which is adding to scripture and judging the children of God which you have no right to do, because it is totally unscriptural. In addition, a couple of times all the commandments were listed and not one single time is the Sabbath mentioned other than when referring to the Jews meeting on the Sabbath. When James at the first Jerusalem council decreed what was binding on the Gentiles, glaringly absent is "they have to keep the Sabbath".
The day of rest in Genesis is a shadow of the final day of rest which is the millenium, when Christ will reign from Jerusalem with a rod of iron. And the meaning of the day of rest is described in Hebrews 3.
Finally, SDA says they believe in grace through faith without works. Based on SDA teaching that a person is outside of the will of God and will accept the mark of the beast if they don't keep the non-commanded Sabbath, SDA makes Sabbath keeping a work in order to keep salvation, which is some man or woman's ideas, with no basis whatsoever in the scriptures.
As long as the word of God isn't rightly divided anybody can convince anybody of anything. As long as scriptures are pulled out of context and used for all kinds of theological positions, as SDA does, it's easy to deny the truth. As long as the writings of Ellen G. White and those who followed her, are read right along with the scriptures, it's not much different than the Mormons holding their KJV in one hand and the Book of Mormons and the Pearl of Great Price in the other, or the JW's with their New World Translation in one hand and the Watchtower in the other, or the Catholics with a Bible in one hand and the doctrines and traditions of the church in the other.
If you use the Bible as your sole source for learning and read the Bible as it is written and understand who what was written to, there is no way you would come up with Sabbath keeping for the church or any other "keeping" for that matter, other than to remember the Lord's death for our sins, which we call communion, which is the only thing the Lord asked us to do in remembrance of him, and to love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and the love your neighbor as yourself. On that hangs the whole law. That is our duty and obligation as Christians and we do that out of love for our Lord Jesus Christ.
--Marianne
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