The Claim
The teaching runs like this. In the days of Hophni and Phinehas the priesthood was corrupt, and God’s faithful people responded by staying away from Shiloh and offering their sacrifices at home. Ellen White records it without rebuking them. Therefore, when a conference is guilty of misjudgment or error today, a member may likewise withhold the tithe or route it somewhere else, and count that a faithful response rather than a disloyal one.
“They worshiped at home. When the leadership was corrupt, God’s people withdrew from the appointed place and offered their sacrifices themselves. That is the pattern.”
The passage exists. It has not been invented, and the words on the slide are the words in the article. So this page will not dispute the quotation. It will do the one thing the slide does not do: print the paragraph it comes from, together with the paragraph before it and the paragraph after it, and let the sentences that were cropped out speak.
The Full Context
What follows is paragraphs 12, 13 and 14 of the article, complete and unedited. Paragraph 13 is the one the slide draws from. The highlighting is added here; the words are hers.
PAR. 12But even this departure from the Lord’s commands failed to satisfy Hophni and Phinehas. They desired the fat, which the Lord had expressly stated should never be eaten, but burned on the altar as an offering to himself. As they had learned to despise the authority of their father, they now despised the authority of God, and sent their servants to demand the flesh of the peace-offerings before the fat had been separated from it. When the offerer remonstrated, “Let them not fail to burn the fat presently, and then take as much as thy soul desireth,” the answer was, “Nay, but thou shalt give it to me now; and if not, I will take it by force.” The people stood in awe of the priests, and submitted to their unlawful claims, robbing themselves of their rightful share of the offering. Thus, appetite, selfishness, and avarice triumphed, exerting their evil influence upon the people at the very time when every heart should have been directed in penitence and faith to the great Sacrifice which was to take away the sins of the world. These things had a telling influence upon the people, and they were fast losing all sense of the sacredness of the sacrificial offerings, and of the importance of attending upon the services of the sanctuary.
PAR. 13The recreant priests added licentiousness to the dark catalogue of their crimes; yet they still polluted by their presence the tabernacle of the Lord, and, laden with sin, dared to come into the presence of a holy God. As the men of Israel witnessed the corrupt course of the priests, they thought it safer for their families not to come up to the appointed place of worship. Many went from Shiloh with their peace disturbed, their indignation aroused, until they at last determined to offer their sacrifices themselves, concluding that this would be fully as acceptable to God, as to sanction in any manner the abominations practiced in the sanctuary.
PAR. 14The worship which Jehovah himself had ordained was despised and neglected because associated with the sins of wicked men. This was a critical time for the people of God. Ungodliness, profligacy, and even idolatry prevailed to a fearful extent among them. And where now was the priest and judge of Israel? Eli was not ignorant of the course pursued by his sons. Faithful men, who mourned over the corruption of the priesthood, presented the matter in its true character before him. The indignation of the people had been aroused, and complaints were coming to him from every side. He had passed over these transgressions till he dared remain silent no longer. But the aged father still manifested the same partiality which he had ever shown his wayward sons. He took no decisive measures to bring them to justice, but mildly remonstrated with them, as with persons of tender conscience, who had for once fallen under temptation:
One clause from earlier in the same article deserves to stand on its own, because it tells the reader in advance how to read what the people did next.
A temptation, and a test of faith and devotion. Those are the terms she sets before she describes a single family staying home.
What the Highlights Show
Four things follow from the paragraphs as they stand.
It is description, not instruction
She is narrating a history. She says what the men of Israel thought, what they feared for their families, and what they at last determined to do. Nowhere does she tell a reader to do the same, and nowhere does she say the people were right. There is no command in the passage, no commendation, not even a mild approval. To take it as a rule for conduct today, a reader has to supply the approval himself and then read it back into her sentences.
She frames it as a loss
Paragraph 12 ends by telling you what was happening to these people: they “were fast losing all sense of the sacredness of the sacrificial offerings, and of the importance of attending upon the services of the sanctuary.” That is not how anyone describes a right decision. Losing a sense of the importance of attending is the injury, not the cure.
And the clause from paragraph 7 puts the same events under the heading of a test: “Again the faith and devotion of the people were tested.” A test of faith and devotion implies that a wrong response was available. Paragraph 13 is what the wrong response looked like.
Her verdict comes in the very next sentence
She does not leave the reader to guess. The instant the account of the home sacrifices is finished, paragraph 14 opens with the assessment: “The worship which Jehovah himself had ordained was despised and neglected because associated with the sins of wicked men.” Despised. Neglected. Those are the words she chooses for the movement the slide presents as faithfulness.
Then she gives its fruit. “This was a critical time for the people of God. Ungodliness, profligacy, and even idolatry prevailed to a fearful extent among them.” If withdrawing to the home altar had been the faithful course, that is not the harvest it would have produced. In her own telling, the stay-at-home movement ran toward idolatry, not toward revival.
The reasoning she reports is theirs, not God’s
Watch the verbs in paragraph 13. The people “thought it safer.” They “determined to offer their sacrifices themselves.” They did so “concluding that this would be fully as acceptable to God.” Every one of those is a report of what was in their minds. She is telling you what they concluded. She never says God agreed.
And on this point the law had already spoken: “Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every place that thou seest: but in the place which the LORD shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there thou shalt do all that I command thee” (Deuteronomy 12:13, 14). The home altar was not a neutral fallback while the priesthood was cleaned up. It was worship God had not authorized. The people were not choosing between corrupt worship and pure worship; they were choosing between a corrupted appointment and an unauthorized substitute, and they chose the substitute.
This Passage Never Mentions Tithe
Read the three paragraphs again and look for the word. It is not there. The subject throughout is attendance at the sanctuary and the peace-offerings that worshipers brought and personally ate a portion of. Tithe is a different thing, given for a different purpose, handled by a different rule, and it does not appear in this article’s account of what the people did.
So the argument has to make two moves before it can reach the tithe, and it has to make both quietly. First it must turn a negative example into a positive model, taking people whom she says were losing their sense of the sacred and presenting them as the faithful remnant. Second it must swap the subject, carrying a conclusion about privately offered sacrifices across to a fund that Scripture assigns to a named channel and calls holy to the Lord.
Neither move is supported by the text. The first runs against her plain verdict in paragraph 14. The second changes the topic in the middle of the argument. Remove either one and nothing about the tithe follows from this article at all.
Where She Speaks Directly
There is no need to infer her mind on withholding from a narrative about somebody else’s sacrifices, because she addressed the question herself, in plain words, to this church, and she framed it exactly as the modern case is framed: people who had lost confidence in how the work was being managed.
“Some have been dissatisfied and have said: ‘I will not longer pay my tithe; for I have no confidence in the way things are managed at the heart of the work.’ But will you rob God because you think the management of the work is not right? Make your complaint, plainly and openly, in the right spirit, to the proper ones. Send in your petitions for things to be adjusted and set in order; but do not withdraw from the work of God, and prove unfaithful, because others are not doing right.”Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9, p. 249 VERIFY
She grants the premise and refuses the remedy. The complaint may be real, and she tells the complainer to make it: plainly, openly, in the right spirit, to the proper ones. What she will not allow is the step from grievance to withholding. Two things are asked for at once, protest and faithfulness, and she does not let the first cancel the second.
This is the sort of counsel that settles a question. It is direct, it is on the exact subject, and it speaks to the exact motive being urged today. An inference drawn against the grain of a story about peace-offerings cannot outrank it.
How the Story Ends
The account does not stop at paragraph 14, and the ending matters, because a pattern is only a pattern if it holds to the end of the chapter.
In 1 Samuel 4 Israel goes out against the Philistines, pitching at Eben-ezer against the Philistine camp at Aphek, and is beaten. The people send to Shiloh for the ark, and Hophni and Phinehas carry it into the camp. Thirty thousand fall. The ark is taken. Both priests die in one day, Eli falls and breaks his neck at the news, and Shiloh, the appointed place, is finished (Jeremiah 7:12). The judgment lands on the whole nation, priests and people together.
The narrative is careful about blame, and it assigns it in both directions. The priests are the cause of the stumbling: “the sin of the young men was very great before the LORD: for men abhorred the offering of the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:17), and Eli is condemned, not for committing their sins, but for failing to restrain them (1 Samuel 3:13). That is a real indictment of leadership, and this site does not soften it. But the people’s withdrawal is never offered as the answer to it. She sets it inside the apostasy, in the same breath as the ungodliness and the idolatry, and the ark is not saved by the households that had been sacrificing at home.
Causing others to stumble is condemned in this story. So is stumbling. The passage indicts the priests without ever excusing the people, and any use of it that rescues one at the expense of the other has stopped reading before the end.
She reports the withdrawal. She does not recommend it.
The people of Shiloh did stay home, and she says so. She also says what it cost them: a lost sense of the sacredness of the offerings, worship God had ordained despised and neglected, and ungodliness and idolatry spreading to a fearful extent. The slide keeps the sentence and drops the verdict that follows it. Put the verdict back and the passage no longer supports withholding anything, least of all a tithe it never mentions.
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