Sabbath Message

Sabbath Message by Wade Cox

Sabbath 5/7/27/120

Dear Friends,

You will remember from the Sabbath Message of 7 August that we mentioned Mr Harold Derksen (CCG Canada) had been dismissed unlawfully from his employment for observing the New Moon. A subsequent Human Rights Tribunal found in his favour. As a result of this finding the media in British Columbia ran the story in such a way that could be described as nothing more than a libellous attack on the Church’s doctrines and beliefs.

After legal representation, we were invited to submit a letter to the editor of the National Post outlining our views on the subject matter of the article in question. What follows is our letter to the National Post. Provided it is published in full, we will have the opportunity to provide a more balanced view to that audience and thus provide a better understanding of the history of Church the over time

The Editor
National Post
Canada
15 September 2004

Dear Sir,

In your editorial of Tuesday, July 20 2004, titled “Bad moon on the rise”, you attacked Mr. Harold Derksen of British Columbia, and the Christian Churches of God internationally, through what appears to be a profound ignorance of Canadian law and the history of the Christian religion.

Mr. Derksen was unlawfully dismissed from his employment contrary to Canadian Law. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal had no alternative but to find for Mr. Derksen. Your assertion that his employers were often without his services was a fabrication. Industrial law in British Columbia also allows employees nine days a year for these purposes. He was unlawfully dismissed on the second day. Annual and Public leave covers the Bible calendar of Sabbaths, New Moons and Feasts. CCG members often work Sundays to compensate for any such leave and their employers benefit. For similar reasons they also find our people honest.

The effect of your intemperate article was to encourage employers and prospective employers to entrain on CCG members, other churches of God, Jews and any one else that keeps other holiday periods. You also implied that these beliefs were “fanciful, obscure and insincerely held”. You trivialised the deep-seated convictions of churches that have been persecuted by people of your mentality for centuries.

The Church of God split with what became the Church of Rome in 192 CE, over their introduction in Rome of the Easter festival in place of the Christian Passover from 154 CE (see the paper The Quartodeciman Disputes (No. 277) at www.ccg.org). Easter is the Anglo-Saxon name of the goddess Istar or Ashtoreth, the consort of Baal. In the Second century there was no such thing as a Trinitarian. There was only One True God who sent Jesus Christ to redeem men. Christ was acknowledged by all Christians as being the God of Psalm 45:6-7, who was anointed by his God above his partners. He was the Great Angel of the Presence who gave the Law to Moses at Sinai (cf. Justin Martyr). The original church under Christ and the apostles did exactly what we do now. Sunday was kept as a day in addition to the Sabbath in Rome. All Christians kept the Sabbath on what is now Saturday. Christmas was a pagan festival shunned by all Christians. It was introduced to “Orthodox” Christianity, with the mother goddess cult as Mariolatry, in the East in the second half of the sixth century, long after our split

What you regard as Christianity did not even become the major sect until 381 CE at the Council of Constantinople. By the Fourth century the priests of the god Attis were complaining that “Christians” had stolen all their doctrines. Attis was “crucified” on a Friday and resurrected on a Sunday at Easter.

In 664, at Whitby, the British people were forced to adopt the Roman system by the political avarice of the Angles, who were converted to Roman Catholicism through the wife of Ethelbert, and Augustine of Canterbury, who went there in 597. The original Christianity was forced to the west and north and finally concentrated into Wales and Scotland and Ireland. They were persecuted underground, and into virtual extinction under the Normans, by the system you are advocating. It was our religion that came to America on the Mayflower seeking freedom from persecution. Far from being the just system you seem to advocate, what you consider to be Christianity has killed, persecuted and maimed more people that any other system on this planet. All these papers are at www.ccg.org.

Our people in Europe were proscribed from the Lateran Councils, and ordered to be delivered up in chains to be burnt from the Council of Genoa (1179-1190). Rabbi Kohn wrote the history of the church in Transylvania (from a Jewish perspective; see Sabbatarians in Transylvania, CCG Publishing, 1998). In that work you will see we were doing, and believing, exactly what we did in the first century and exactly what we are doing and saying now. Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

The Reformation was forced on the Europeans because people were becoming aware just how corrupt and rotten the system claiming to be Christian was. The Lutherans were actually formed from a base of the Churches of God. When they became powerful they persecuted us more so than the Roman Catholics before them. Our houses were entered, our women killed and the children taken because we kept the foodlaws, and they found goose fat and not pig fat, or lard, for cooking (Kohn details it all).

From 1175 The English Pope Nicholas Breakespeare, Adrian IV, handed Ireland over to England under Henry II, to stamp out the Quartodecimans of Cashel and establish Roman Catholicism. In Scotland Queen Margaret was made a “saint” for her vicious persecution of the Sabbatarians. In 1192 they burnt us at the stake at Oxford. In 1645 it was a capital offence to hold our religion in England. We were imprisoned and our property confiscated in the Commonwealth well up into the Nineteenth century, for keeping the Sabbath. The views you expressed to your readers are what we have experienced over centuries. Fortunately, now, the law does not allow such behaviour. You write that employers will always accommodate their employees’ legitimate family and personal commitments, as though ours was not a legitimate belief or commitment. If you did not mean that, as you now claim, then what was the purpose of the article? In your article you attack the limitations that might be imposed on dress regulations by faith. That was directed at other minority groups such as Sikhs and Muslims. What a particularly uninformed and hateful little piece of journalism that was Mr. Editor. The fact is that we need these laws to protect us all from such attacks and the vicious hateful bigotry you espoused under the guise of “employer property rights”. You see nothing wrong in forcing conscientious Christians to keep pagan holidays such as Christmas and Easter, and Sunday rather than the biblical Sabbaths of God. In the US particularly, the entire civil calendar is oriented around the pagan days of human sacrifice.

The days are coming when such views will disappear, but from what we see there will be a lot more pain and suffering at the hands of the so-called orthodox before it is over. If you, the media and the establishment, do not change your behaviour, there will be continued conflict with Islam and the other faiths. We have not changed, despite this persecution, and we keep the faith once delivered to the saints as we were commanded. These are the elect: those who keep the Commandments of God and the Testimony or Faith of Jesus Christ (Rev. 12:17; 14:12).

What you do is against the Laws of God and the Dominion of Canada, and against the laws of other nations. We want nothing less than a public apology from you, in at least as prominent a space as you attacked us, under your own editorial banner with the names of the writer/s displayed.

Wade Cox

Coordinator General