Lying For God: What Adventists Knew About the Sabbath and Lied About

Here is a document concerning the Seventh Day Adventist chruch, of which Armstrongism is a branch of, deliberately LIED about the sabbath being kept in Genesis

Lying for God

LYING FOR GOD: What Adventists Knew And When They Knew It!  
8th Edition – August 1, 2014   
By 
KERRY B. WYNNE 
B.A., English & history (1970 & 1972), Pacific Union College M.A., educational administration, Andrews University (1978) 
WILLIAM H. HOHMANN B.A., theology, Ambassador College (1976) 
ROBERT K. SANDERS Founder Of Truth Or Fables.Com 
DUANE JOHNSON Independent Biblical Researcher and Author   
Part I – Verdict: No Sabbath In Genesis 

Part II – Ellen White And Her Enablers 
Copyright 2014

THAT SABBATH ABANDONMENT WAS VIRTUALLY IMMEDIATE  

A variety of Early Christian writers documented that Christians chose to worship on Sunday, beginning in 70 AD and continuing until the Roman Catholic Church came into existence hundreds of years after “Sabbath abandonment” was universal (140 AD). Using their excerpts to support either point of view is filled with risks and challenges.  Great caution must be observed.  Cox (The Literature of the Sabbath Question, 1865) provides evidence that the writings of the early fathers have been heavily edited and even “tampered with.” There are translation problems with documents believed to be legitimate, and some of the documents are believed to be fraudulent. Our research suggests that the biggest mistake Sabbatarians make in using these excerpts is their failure to understand that many of these writers discuss the term “Sabbath” in the context of the Sabbath festival (such as whether or not to fast) and not in the Jewish sense of a day that is intrinsically holy and requires resting upon it by Divine law. At the same time, taken as a whole, these excerpts demonstrate that the Christian Church during its first 500 years or more worshiped on Sundays and celebrated the Sabbath festival at selected times of the liturgical year. If they rested on these Sabbath festivals, it was because of the festive nature of the tradition, and if they worshiped on them it was because it was a festival established as a tradition to keep alive the memory of the Creation Week. The Lord's Supper was often celebrated on this festival. From the Jewish perspective, the early Christians, then, “broke” the Sabbath on all the Saturdays of the year that were not set aside as a Sabbath festival, and they “broke” it on the Sabbath festival days because the festive activities were not what the Law of Moses would have allowed on the weekly Sabbath of the Decalogue. While these writers had the advantage of perspective that living very close in time to the days of the apostles, they did not have access to the large body of the  research that has been done on this subject over the last nearly 2,000 years.  While a study of the opinions of the early fathers is useful, it is important to keep in mind that a number of biblical concepts and themes
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are opposed to Sabbatarian thinking. Just one example is the principle that observing the ordinance of circumcision was a prerequisite to keeping the Sabbath. Do not suppose for a moment that SDA leaders, historians, and theologians are not keenly aware that the Christian writers of the second and third centuries were not virtually unanimous in their disdain for the Jewish concept of Sabbath-keeping. Michael Morrision of Grace Community International comments that SDA Theologian Mervyn Maxwell, in his book, Early Sabbath-Sunday History, concedes that second and early third-century writers had basically the same negative attitudes toward the Sabbath (see part 3, note 27) and summarizes this concept as follows: These writers taught that the new covenant had put an end to the old law — and that now the new spiritual Israel, with its new covenant and its new spiritual law, no longer needed the literal circumcision, literal sacrifices, and literal Sabbath. Barnabas observed that God "has circumcised our hearts." Justin referred triumphantly to the new spiritual circumcision in Christ. Irenaeus taught that circumcision, sacrifices, and Sabbaths were given of old as signs of better things to come; the new sacrifice, for example, is now a contrite heart. Tertullian, too, had a new spiritual sacrifice and a new spiritual circumcision. Each of these writers also taught that a new spiritual concept of the Sabbath had replaced the old literal one.... This supplanting of the old law by the new; of the literal Sabbath by the spiritual, was a very Christ-centered concept for these four writers. God's people have inherited the covenant only because Christ through His sufferings inherited it first for us, Barnabas said. For Justin the new, final, and eternal law that has been given to us was "namely Christ" Himself.  It was only because Christ gave the law that He could now also be "the end of it," said Irenaeus.  And it is Christ who invalidated "the old" and confirmed "the new," according to Tertullian. Indeed Christ did this, both Irenaeus and Tertullian said, not so much by annulling the law as by so wonderfully fulfilling it that He extended it far beyond the mere letter. To sum up: The early rejection of the literal Sabbath appears to be traceable to a common hermeneutic of Old and New Testament scriptures. -  C. Mervyn Maxwell in Maxwell and Damsteegt, Early Sabbath-Sunday History," (pp. 154-156)