Sabbath School Today, Volume 9 - Paul E. Penno

Chapter 37
Arrest in Jerusalem
One can easily imagine how it must have felt for Paul to be among his
own brethren when they repeatedly refused to understand the good news he
was trying to give to them. What a frustrating situation! No matter how he
changed the way he approached his presentation of the truth, it slammed up
against the brick wall of preconceived opinions (Acts 13:42-45; 14:2; 19;
15:1, 2; 17:5, 6; 32; etc.). Then along comes a trusted confidant who advised
him to "just compromise a little, no one will think it matters in the long
view." How often are we tempted to compromise truth for the sake of
convenience or political correctness? We see it taking place all around us in
the church today.
Because of pride and the stubbornness of preconceived opinions,
compromise and its resulting confusion have plagued God's church from the
beginning, and will continue until finally a faithful few will wake up, wipe
the fog from their spiritual glasses and repent of their Laodicea blindness.
"Because of a failure to appreciate the 1888 message, far back in the
1890s there was a tendency to confuse Quaker author Hannah Whitall
Smith's The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life with true righteousness by
faith, (cf. General Conference Bulletin, 1893, pp. 358, 359). ... Through the
decades there have been prominent examples of this confusion over Roman
Catholic concepts of piety and the 'interior life.'" [1]
Most of us have heard the adage: "a drop of arsenic will poison the
whole cup of tea." Several events in our history have contributed their drops
of arsenic to our collective thinking. The "drop of arsenic" that the Jewish
Christians were attempting to add was that circumcision, or any "works of
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