The Chief Pharisee of the law, James Malm has laid down the decree about Sabbath Keeping for those living in far-flung places of the Northern or Southern pole areas are to start Sabbath at 6:00 pm regardless of whether or not the sun has actually set. Just more legalistic lunacy from the Pharisaical right of the COG.
The Weekly Sabbath begins when the sun sets locally. Persons living north or south of 55 degrees may observe the Sabbath from 18:00 hours [this is the average sunset time at Jerusalem], and all of the brethren in any such location should observe the Sabbath at the same time by common accord. When Christ comes he will decide on this matter.
Malm's stance and the SDA church stance is based upon late 1700's and early 1800's information and not on a single thing from the time of the Israelites when they started keeping Sabbath AFTER their captivity. Just another reason the Sabbath command was for those ONLY in the Middle East and not anywhere else in the world.
Contrast Pharisee Malm's comment above with this truth:
CAN YOU KEEP THE SABBATH AT THE NORTH POLE?
Imagine you are trying to keep the Jewish Sabbath above the Arctic Circle! The Arctic night “Sabbath” eventually arrives. Suddenly you are not allowed to light a fire in your dwelling place because the sun went down but didn’t come back up. Your heater goes out. You honor God’s “law” by not re-lighting it. The next morning you are found frozen to death, and you go down in history as a noble Christian Jewish Sabbath-keeper who would rather die than break the Jewish Sabbath. Perhaps you miraculously survive the Polar Winter “Sabbath without a fire. You can’t work for the oil company that hired you until the sun comes up (making it “Saturday” morning) and goes back down again, creating a Saturday night. Eventually, however, the sun does come back up, stays up for a day, and goes back down. The Arctic stretch of extended non-Sabbath is finally over. You can go to work now. Sabbath-keeping is conventional for a while, but eventually the sun comes up and won’t go down! Now you have to contend with the extended Arctic stretch of non-Sabbath time. Because the sun won’t go down, Sabbath won’t “start” on Friday night. You have to go to work every day because the Sabbath won’t start since there is no sundown on Friday night.
Actually, there are more variations of this Arctic Sabbath nonsense. In the Arctic fall, If the Sun fails to set on a Friday night, you have “endless” work days. If the Sun fails to set on a Saturday night in the Arctic fall, you have an “endless” Sabbath. We will leave it up to your imagination to figure out what happens in the Arctic spring depending on which day the sun rises for the first time of the season. Please review the dual requirements of the Sabbath commandment. Both requirements apply to Jews. Christians who keep the Jewish Sabbath seem to forget the six-day requirement since it works against the ill-contrived idea that Adam and Eve qualified to rest on the 7th day of Creation along with God. God had worked for six days prior, but Adam and Eve had existed only about one day:
Exodus 20:8 (NIV): “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
If you manage to die of over-work during this stretch of non-Sabbath time, you go down in history as the Sabbath-keeping Christian who would rather die than break the Jewish Sabbath. Is it illogical to think that God would impose a moral law on His earthlings that could not be kept anywhere in the solar system. The sins of fornication and adultery can be committed on Planet Earth or in a space ship on its way to Mars, but the Sabbath can’t be kept anywhere but in a climate like Palestine in the Mid-East. The Adventist prophetess, Ellen G. White, “solves” this problem by mandating that people should not live in parts of the Earth where the Sabbath cannot be kept. Try presenting the Gospel to a Polar-living Eskimo while at the same time telling him that he has to move to a different part of the world in order to keep “God’s Law.”
"In the countries where there is no sunset for months and again no sunrise for months the period of time will be calculated by the records kept. But God has a world large enough and proper and right for the human beings He has created to inhabit it without finding homes in those lands so objectionable in very many, many ways" (Ellen G. White, Letter #167, 23 March, 1900).
God gave the Sabbath to Israel only. The Nation of Israel is located in a mild climate where the sun does rise and set every 24 hours for the entire year and where the temperatures are moderate enough to get through a cold winter night simply by piling on the blankets.
If you lived in the Arctic Circle as so many people do now, would you be condemned to Hell and receive the Mark of the Beast because you COULD NOT keep the Sabbath right no matter how hard you tried? Would God have to give you a special dispensation to break His law so you wouldn’t end up with the Mark of the Beast?
On top of all this, Sabbath-keepers at the North Pole cannot keep the Sabbath according to a fixed calendar or the lunar calendar. During the Arctic winter, the moon’s position remains very close to the sun after it goes down. Here is what happens according to astronomer, Laura Spitler:
While the Moon does rise during the summer at the North Pole, since the Sun is always up, you generally can't see it, so I'll focus on the movement of the Moon during the winter.
The daily movement from Earth's rotation causes the Moon to circle once around the sky. If you spent the entire day staring at it, you'd have to turn around exactly once. This movement is also the same that the Sun makes during the summer . . .
The second movement caused by the Moon's orbit around the Earth is analogous to the movement of the Sun over the course of a year only it repeats over the course of a lunar month. Near the new Moon phase, the Moon is near the Sun and therefore never rises during the winter. As the Moon approaches full, it will start to pop up above the horizon. Eventually near the full Moon phase it will be high enough in the sky to stay up all day and circle like the Sun. . . The elevation of the circle will rise as the Moon becomes completely full and then start to decrease until it begins to dip below the horizon. Eventually the Moon will stop rising at all as it gets close enough to the new phase. The cycle then repeats.
It appears that even our lunar Sabbath brethren can’t keep the Sabbath “right” above the Arctic Circle. Will they go to Hell because they can’t keep it right? Does God have to give them a special dispensation that would go something like, “Well, my lunar Sabbath-keepers have such a good heart and they really want to do what’s right, but in this case they can’t. I’m going to let them into Heaven anyway.” from Lying for God
"The Easter Lily, the flowery symbol of Easter, which turns up at church altars everywhere that day, is actually not a Spring flower. It was a pagan phallic symbol that represented a sexual reproductive organ. It obviously reflected on the fertility aspect of the celebration."
