How can the progressive covenantalist view of the Sabbath deal with the fact that worship is of natural law? I think that the best way forward is to say, that there is indeed a moral and natural precept that man must set aside time for worship of God (E.g. a PC could agree with Thomas that: The precept about hallowing the Sabbath, understood literally, is partly moral and partly ceremonial. It is a moral precept in the point of commanding man to aside a certain time to be given to Divine things. For there is in man a natural inclination to set aside a certain time for each necessary thing, such as refreshment of the body, sleep, and so forth. Hence according to the dictate of reason, man sets aside a certain time for spiritual refreshment, by which man’s mind is refreshed in God. And thus to have a certain time set aside for occupying oneself with Divine things is the matter of a moral precept.). One can argue then, even on the progressive covenantalist view, that the Sabbath command did in fact contain general moral equity insofar as one counts the priestly and cultic activities that occurred on the Sabbath as an expression of this moral principle, though not exhaustive of it as the other holy days of the OC would count as well. One can say then that this same moral command of natural law is expressed today whenever Christians gather to worship on Sundays.
In the end, this would end up being very close to Beale’s view of the Sabbath, with the 2 differences being that 1) A PC wouldn’t call Sunday a “new Sabbath” since, strictly speaking, “Sabbath” applies to the ceremonial aspect of the precept that one must rest bodily and 2) the pre-Mosaic patriarchs wouldn’t have observed a Saturday sabbath. If compared with the Leiden Synopsis, the 3rd difference added (seeing as Beale already agrees with the PC here) would be, of course, that no precept of physical rest is commanded on Sunday.
Edit: I have realized that the view that I have set forth here is precisely that of Johannes Cocceius. It would be interesting to me to see if PCers turn to him in the near future. And after reading Casey Carmichael's book it seems even Gomarus held something like Cocceius's view and negated virtually every reason for Sabbatarianism. Andreas Rivet is also with us, though not in the details. Once again, Cocceius had the most mature position.
This much I am confident in. A few questions remain for me, however, in trying to reconcile the PC view with the natural law tradition:
Is the selection of Sunday of divine command (as Wellum thinks) or of custom (as Calvin thinks https://web.archive.org/web/20221122151242/https://calvinistinternational.com/2017/05/07/calvin-lords-day-liberty-church/)? I lean Calvin.
Does the natural law, which commands worship, command it as a moral positive law so that God must always decide which day(s) it is done on, or is it simply natural and up to man to decide in cases when there is an absence of a positive command? The result of this is that under the first view, God would have had to have given the patriarchs some positive command to worship on some day that we do not know of. On the second view, they decided when to do so for themselves. The second seems most likely to me given the distinction between natural and instituted worship. I would however, like to know how Wellum would deal with this.