Lesson 1: “Persecuted but Not Forsaken”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
We’re starting a new quarter of Sabbath School lessons today: “Uniting Heaven and Earth. Christ in Philippians and Colossians”. When you think of Paul’s letters to the churches that he penned from prison, do you think of them as documents teaching us how to suffer with dignity while establishing an organizational structure for the church? Or do you read these epistles and see Paul revealing to us the truth and power of the gospel and counting his suffering a small price to pay in exchange for knowing Christ Jesus?
Agenda Revealed
The introduction to this quarterly’s study guide sets the stage for this quarter’s lesson by emphasizing the idea that Paul’s prison epistles of Philippians and Colossians are revealing “the purpose of the plan of salvation: uniting heaven and earth.” The author, Clinton Wahlen, is an associate director of the Biblical Research Institute at the General Conference, and the Teachers Comments and study questions are composed by Adenilton Tavares de Aguiar, PhD, at the Theological Seminary at Adventist University Center of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Together, these men have built a case for Paul’s prison experience is showing Adventists how to organize and stay the course to preach the Three Angel’s Messages.
The last paragraph of the introduction says:
We’ll consider some of the most sublime statements found anywhere about Christ’s divinity and how He gave it all up to save us. We’ll see Paul wrestling from prison with problems in one church he raised up (Philippi) and in one that he himself never even visited (Colossae). The connections Paul established throughout the “world church” of that time enabled him, even from a Roman prison, to respond to challenges. He knew his time was short, and he did all he could to draw the church closer to heaven and to each other. In so doing, he shows us how God’s church today can unite with heaven to fulfill the last-day commission of Revelation 14, which we know as “the three angels’ messages.”
Of course, when the author says “God’s church today” he refers to the Seventh-day Adventist Organization which is actually NOT God’s church today. Instead, the Adventist organization is a counterfeit church, a religion dedicated to a fallible Jesus, a view of humanity that denies our nature as literal spiritual beings who dwell in a mortal tent (as Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 5:1–9), and a commitment to the fourth commandment. Adventism teaches that the actual seventh day of the current calendar is literally holy, a day comprised of sacred time, and keeping the Sabbath will be the final test of loyalty to God during the coming Time of Trouble.
Furthermore, what does the author mean when he says that Paul “did all he could to draw the church closer to heaven and to each other”? How does one “draw closer to heaven”?
In Adventism, drawing closer to heaven can only mean perfecting one’s obedience to the law and spreading the Adventist “gospel”. In fact, that idea is overtly stated in the last sentence of the quotation above when the author says that Paul “shows shows us how God’s church today can unite with heaven to fulfill the last-day commission of Revelation 14, which we know as “the three angels’ messages.”
The average Adventist reader would barely notice these words. They have the expected ring of familiarity, and most Adventists believe that the “gospel in verity” is the “Three Angels’ Messages” of Revelation 14.
Yet Paul was doing no such thing. First, the gospel Paul preached was revealed directly to Him by the risen Christ, and this gospel is the one gospel to which Paul dedicated His life:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.—1 Corinthians 15:3–5 LSB
The gospel of first importance is this: Christ died for our sins according to Scripture; He was buried, He was raised to life on the third day according to Scripture. These facts alone comprise the simple gospel. In fact, Paul specifically said that his entire purpose in preaching and traveling and enduring persecution and hardship and imprisonment was one specific focus:
For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.—1 Corinthians 2:2 LSB
Paul never preached Sabbath-keeping or an ongoing atonement in heaven nor an investigative judgment. He preached Christ crucified and all that the death of Christ accomplished for the salvation of humanity and the redemption of all creation.
Three Angels’ Messages?
In fact, it is shockingly perverse to attribute to Paul’s suffering for Christ a spurious gospel and the appropriation of Revelation 14 for an Adventist agenda.
First, Paul wrote these two prison epistles about 30 to 35 yers before Revelation was written by the apostle John. John wrote about 20 years after Jerusalem was destroyed, and Paul wrote about 10 years before it was destroyed. He wasn’t in any way drawing people’s attention to Revelation 14.
Yet even if someone argues that Paul was espousing the message of Revelation 14 even before it was written, we have to know what that message is. Here is Revelation 14:6–10, the passage called within Adventism, the Three Angels’ Messages, or “the gospel in verity”. These messages are Adventism’s unique last-day message that they believe they are supposed to declare to the world in the last days. Here is the passage:
Then I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who inhabit the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people. And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God, and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come; worship Him who made the heaven and the earth and sea and springs of waters.” And another angel, a second one, followed, saying, “FALLEN, FALLEN IS BABYLON THE GREAT, she who has made all the nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.” Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, and he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His rage, and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.—Revelation 14:6–10 LSB
Adventists say that this passage opens with the first angel declaring the beginning of the investigative judgment which, they say, began October 22, 1844. When that angel says “the hour of His judgment has come,” it is saying that Jesus has entered the most holy place in heaven and is continuing His atonement by applying His blood to all the sins of professed believers that they have remembered to confess. This horrifying message, says Adventism, is the first angel’s first cry, and the world is supposed to take seriously that Jesus is in the last stages of judgment to see who is saved and who is not.
Secondly, this passage calls the world to return to the “true worship” of the Creator who made the heavens and the earth at creation and supposedly established the sacred seventh day, the Sabbath, when He finished His work. In this way, Adventism interprets the first angel as warning everyone that judgment is occurring, and they’d better get ready and start keeping the Sabbath or they will fail the judgment and be lost.
Keeping the seventh-day Sabbath, they say, is the final test of loyalty for those who will be saved, and the first angel is calling people to seventh-day Sabbatarianism so that they will not fail the judgment.
The second angel, therefore, is the one who calls all Sunday-keepers out of their Sunday churches and thereby get out of Babylon. The Catholic Church, they say, is Babylon, and the Sunday-churches of Protestantism are her daughters. Getting out of Babylon, therefore, means leaving one’s Sunday church and joining an Adventist church, adopting the idea that Saturday is sacred, and they must worship on that day in order to please God and pass the judgment.
Finally, the third angel declares that if anyone fails to get out of Babylon and worships “the beast and his image” (which Adventism identifies as worshiping on Sunday), that person will receive the mark of the beast. Sunday-worship will be the mark of the beast, and the lost world will follow the beast and the false sabbath called Sunday.
In other words, Adventists are supposed to bring the message of the Sabbath to a lost and dying world so that they can escape eternal death when Jesus returns. The saved will be those who are loyal to the Sabbath, willing to die to defend their day.
Significantly, the Lord Jesus simply doesn’t play a role in this Adventist “gospel” except indirectly as the Creator who rested on the seventh day and declared time to be holy.
Paul isn’t teaching Adventism
Anyone who reads through Philippians and Colossians, however, will never find this Adventist interpretation of them. The Bible never commands the church keep Sabbath on the seventh day, nor does it command the observance of any specific holy day! Instead, the book of Colossians explicitly says that Jesus is the reality toward which the Sabbath pointed:
Therefore, no one is to judge you in food and drink, or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day– things which are [only] a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.—Colossians 2:16, 17 LSB
Further, the Teachers Notes say that in these epistles, Paul is illustrating what suffering love looks like—an example to the Adventist readers to endure hardship and put up with mistreatment for the sake of spreading the Three Angel’s Messages!
Beyond the example of suffering, the author says, Paul was demonstrating “strategies for preaching the gospel”. In fact, he lists four strategies which Paul is supposedly teaching Adventists to do to ensure their last-day message continues to grow throughout the word:
- Paul selected important cities to evangelize, chosen for their significance in the Roman Empire.
- Paul invested in training people to lead and grow the churches he planted and to plant even more.
- By practicing his “Jew-first” approach, preaching in the synagogues of every city he entered before turning to the gentiles, he demonstrated that people have “home mission fields”: family first, neighbors second.
- Finally, Paul maintained regular communications with the churches he planted by sending them letters.
Frankly, reading Philippians and Colossians in which Paul pours out love for Christ, explaining His humility and eternal power, and revealing how important it is to leave false doctrines and practices that obscure the pure gospel of the Lord Jesus—reading this and trying to impose “strategies for preaching” is actually horrifying. The lesson and its authors eclipse the finished work of the Lord Jesus, and the truth of the gospel and its power to make spiritually dead people alive is utterly obscured!
There is only one way to understand what Paul is saying in these letters: reading them in context. The lesson does not lead the reader through these epistles but rather selects fragments of sentences and passages to cobble together an Adventist agenda: to cement the reader in his or her Adventist worldview and to emphasize the importance of their Sabbath-worship and the fear that they will fail the investigative judgment if they darken the door of a Sunday church.
The Adventist readers will be reinforced in the Adventist great controversy worldview and all believe they have just had a Bible study explaining that Adventist doctrine is the only true gospel.
I have a challenge for you: get a notebook. During this quarter, copy the books of Philippians and Colossians into that notebook. Do a few verses each day, and ask the Lord to teach you what He wants you to know from reading these books.
I promise you that these epistles, read and pondered IN CONTEXT, one word at a time, will not say what you have learned they say. Proof-texting destroys the meanings of the words, and in context, Paul’s meanings are clear and profound.
I pray that instead of allowing the lessons to cloud your mind this quarter that you turn to the Bible itself and allow it to speak God’s word directly to your mind and heart.
God is faithful, and He will not fail to make His word come to life.
But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is brought to an end in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart, but WHENEVER a person TURNS TO THE LORD, THE VEIL IS TAKEN AWAY. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, [there] is freedom. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.—2 Corinthians 3:14–18 LSB
Read God’s word in context for yourself. The Lord will teach you by His Spirit as you submit your own mind to His word. Ask Him to show you the truth about yourself, the truth about the Lord Jesus, and the truth about His finished atonement and about how to be born again through faith in Him.
Let this year be the beginning of something completely new! Trust the One who died for you—and allow His own word to change you from the inside out! †
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
- Who Is That Baby? - December 25, 2025
- December 27, 2025–January 2, 2026 - December 25, 2025
- We Got Mail - December 25, 2025