# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S342
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

342 The Teaching of the Lutheran Church concerning Sunday.

things relate as the body to the shadow. It would be an arbitrary restriction of Paul's general statement if one wished to understand his words not of the Sabbath in general, but only of the fixing of its observance on the seventh day of the week. So long as it is not proven that the third commandment, besides the observance of the Sabbath, also permanently commands the observance of one out of seven days, one commits a petitio principii — one assumes in advance what was to be proven. Consequently one has no right to restrict the generality of the saying. According to this passage, which is the most definite, the other passages are also to be understood, even where the word Sabbath does not expressly stand, but the Sabbath nevertheless belongs among what is indicated as something that no longer binds in the New Testament. Galatians 4:10-11; Romans 14:5-6. The very same thing the Lord Jesus himself gave clearly enough to be understood, so far as his hearers could then bear it, Matthew 12:1-8, cf. Mark 2:23, Luke 6:1f. For he draws his introduction from examples which the Jews approved. But these plainly belong to the ceremonial law, namely that David in a case of need ate of the showbread, and that the priests' labor in slaughtering the sacrifices in the temple nevertheless did not violate the Sabbath; and how could he then draw the application to the Sabbath from this, if the Sabbath too were not a part of the ceremonial law, at least in the point where the Pharisees accused the disciples of Christ of a breach of the Sabbath? To this, however, he immediately adds that they ought rather to have been mindful of the moral law of love, and he affirms that he himself is Lord even of the Sabbath. Since he elsewhere affirms that he will abolish nothing of the books of Moses or of the prophets, but has come to fulfill all that is written therein, the Sabbath, like the sacrifices, must have had a meaning to which a reality corresponds in the New Testament, through whose manifestation the institution of the Sabbath is not dissolved, not declared ungodly or contemptible, but fulfilled, and what it was meant to signify is accomplished. Mark further reports, at verse 27, that the Lord also said in addition to this, that the Sabbath was made for man's sake, not man for the Sabbath's sake. This reason implies that the Sabbath either does not belong among the necessary duties at all, or has, of these, only such an obligation in the New Testament as it is a means for them, and ought not to be extended beyond this purpose, lest it conflict with the necessary duty of love of neighbor. Of virtue, insofar as one understands by it the essential and wholly necessary duties, one could not say that virtue was made for man's sake and not man for virtue's sake. For man indeed exists for the sake of virtue, that he may freely do the will of God and afterward enjoy the most pleasant consequences of it. Those who wish to find in the third commandment a twofold positive law — one particular to Israel until Christ, and one abiding forever for all times — can, from no biblical