Church History

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If you are familiar with Alphanomega Ministries or Apologia Church, then you know that I'm the director of Alphanomega Ministries, which we began in 1983.
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How many people in the room were not in existence when we started Alphanomega Ministries? Thank you very much. Makes me feel very old every time
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I say that. It's a lot of fun. But also one of the pastors at Apologia Church, and I've seen a number of you visit us down there currently in Mesa, Arizona.
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And you might be aware of the fact that I'm road tripping right now. Last night on the road, thank goodness, though it's been a great three plus weeks.
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I'm looking forward to getting home, as most people probably would. In fact, if it weren't for you all,
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I could have gotten home last night. And the fact that I rode my bike up Mt.
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Charleston this morning, but that didn't have anything to do with my staying over. No, not at all.
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So it's good to be with you this evening. What I've been asked to address, and I will do so, recognizing that we have moms with children here.
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Las Vegas may never sleep, but I do. And I'm more of a morning person than a nighttime person.
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So we will, I will not have you here. I will not preach a sermon as long as Jeff Durbin.
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Okay, how's that? I don't want to make sure you're aware that one of the two of us can control our time urges.
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But it was an interesting request, and that was to talk to you a little bit about just whoever
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I chose to talk about in church history. The first class I taught after I graduated.
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The next morning, I have to leave the KOA, and I love Las Vegas' KOA. It's a parking lot, and it's just camping out in the wilderness in Las Vegas.
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I think they have fake trees there too. But anyway, I have to leave at a certain time in the morning because I've planned it to get down to Metropolitan Kingman, Arizona.
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Anybody been to Kingman, Arizona? Wow, it's just a great place not to live, isn't it? But they have 4G there, and so I'm going to pull into the
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Walmart parking lot because they generally don't chase you out of the Walmart parking lot if you're in an
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RV. And so I'm going to park down in the Walmart parking lot tomorrow, and I will be teaching a church history class from the front of my truck in Germany tomorrow morning at 10 a .m.,
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which is I think 7 p .m. their time. I think that's how it works out, something like that. Wonderful group of believers over there.
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We've been doing this up until 2020. I had visited them every year for years, and so I know them personally.
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I'll probably never get to see them again, but we still do what we do. And so we've been doing church history, and we're barely through.
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We're right at the end of the period of persecution, and we actually haven't gone through the apologists and all sorts of other stuff, so we are going really slowly.
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And they don't mind. They don't care. It's greatly encouraging. So church history is my thing. Thankfully, I had a great church history professor in seminary.
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Sadly, sometimes you can have professors in seminary and Bible college turn you off to a subject. My church history professor turned me on to the subject, and I've had the opportunity of going over to Europe a of times, and so a lot of these things
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I can sort of provide some background to. But what I want to do is I just want to look at a few people that you may have never heard of before, or if you have, you may only know a little something about them.
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I'm not going to be doing a big bio of each one or anything like that. I just want to wet your appetite to recognize that we will, on one hand, say that Christ has been building his church for 2 ,000 years, but if we really believed that, then we'd have some interest in what he has done in the lives of the people who came before us.
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But let's be honest. Most of evangelical Christianity in the United States could care less.
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Church history is Billy Graham. I mean, that's as far back as it goes, and I was raised certainly within a context where if they didn't dress like you and preach like you and believe exactly like you, they probably weren't
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Christians anyways, which means there basically weren't any Christians until the 20th century. And so the idea of an intimate connection to people who came before us.
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So let me give you an example. Let me talk about someone that I have no earthy idea who he was. I don't know where he lived.
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But in 1993, Pope John Paul II visited the
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United States for World Youth Day, and it was up in Denver, Colorado.
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And Rich Pierce and I, we are Alpha and Omega Ministries. We were Alpha and Omega Ministries back then. We're still Alpha and Omega Ministries today.
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We've grown not a bit. And so we went up to Denver, Colorado.
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I did two debates with a man by the name of Jerry Matatix on the subject of the papacy. About seven, seven and a half hours we went.
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And while we were up there, I saw a newspaper advertisement, a newspaper article, about the
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Papal Treasures Exhibit. I don't want, I could care less about looking at rubies and diamonds and emeralds and stuff like that.
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I could care less about any of it. But I was reading the article, and all of a sudden I went, Rich, we're going.
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He's like, why? Because a page from papyri manuscript
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P72 was on display at the Papal Treasures Exhibit. So I want you to picture this.
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You walk in. It's one of the first things they had on display. It's under glass, of course. I go walking up to it.
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This is the earliest manuscript we have of 1st, 2nd Peter and Jude. It is from somewhere between 175 and 200.
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So it's very, very early. And I just start reading this thing.
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And I'm almost drooling on the glass. And there's, there's, it's very, very readable.
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There are a number of things called the Nomena Sacra. Christians, for some reason, we don't know why, God, Jesus, Lord, Son, there are a number of,
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Spirit, there are a number of words that for some reason they would always abbreviate them in their manuscripts and put a line over them.
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We do not know why. But you can always tell an early Christian manuscript by, oh, look, Nomena Sacra. Sacred name.
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That's a Christian manuscript. We don't know why they did it. There's lots of theories and stuff like that. But I'm looking at the
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Nomena Sacra. And it was the end of 1st Peter and the beginning of 2nd Peter. So 2nd
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Peter 1 .1 contains what's called a Granville -Sharp construction, where Jesus is identified as our, as our God and Savior.
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God and Savior, both words applied to Jesus. And so I'm reading the Granville -Sharp construction. Here's an affirmation of the deity of Christ before the beginning of the 3rd century.
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This is very, very early. This is long before Dan Brown ever thought anybody did that. Remember the Da Vinci Code? That guy made millions and millions of dollars out of lying to people.
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But I'm looking at all this stuff, and people would sort of walk up, and Rich would stand next to me, and they'd read the description, and then they'd look down at, they'd look at me, and I'm just going like this, you know.
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And they'd look over at Rich, go, can he read that? And Rich would go, yeah. Look at this,
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Harold. This man's reading this ancient manuscript. And people start gathering around. The security people are doing this number, you know.
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So Rich would drag me off to go watch, look at a T .R. for a little while, and then I'd come straight back again. And eventually the, we got the look from the security people that we needed to move on.
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Point being, here is a manuscript written by someone we don't know.
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How many of you, I mean, can I borrow this? Do you have to register this as a deadly weapon?
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I mean, that is, I mean. Okay, this is my friend Jeffrey Rice's work.
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This is a post -Tenebrous look. I could recognize it. And if I told you where he got this, you'd be stunned.
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But I'll tell you afterwards, not on video. Okay. But that's huge.
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All right. How many of us, how much of the Bible would you possess if the only way you could get it was to hand copy it?
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Most of us would not have Zephaniah. Okay. Poor Zephaniah. I feel sorry for him.
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You know, you're going to run into him someday in heaven, and he's going to go, what did you think of my book? And you go, who are you?
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Another good reason to read Zephaniah before you go to bed tonight, in case you die, and run into Zephaniah. You do not want that to happen.
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But the reality is most of us would have a much smaller Bible if we had to hand copy it.
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But here was someone, and he wasn't a professional scribe. It's not the best copied manuscript in the world, as far as the style and handwriting, all that kind of stuff.
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But he loved the Word of God. And what probably happened was he was traveling, he comes into another fellowship, and they start reading from this book, and he goes,
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I've never heard that book. What is it? These are Peter's epistles.
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Well, we don't have that in our fellowship. Could I make a copy of that? Sure. Now, how long did it take to do that?
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I don't know, but try going home tonight, get a piece of paper and a pen, and writing out 1st, 2nd Peter, and June.
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See how long it takes you. And see how many mistakes you make along the way, by the way. But he did because he loved the
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Word of God. And we don't know. Persecution was on and off from the days of Nero in AD 64 until the
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Decian persecution in 249, and then pretty much 249 all the way through 313.
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It's empire -wide pretty much the whole time, and especially 303 to 313. It's just maximum effort at that time to wipe out all of Christianity.
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Was it legal for him to have copied that? Was he breaking the law, the
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Roman law, to copy? Because the Romans always went after our scriptures. They wanted to destroy our scriptures.
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They knew we were people of the book. And so was he risking his life? We don't know. I don't know who copied it.
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No one put their names on it or anything like that. I don't know the exact date. But here is someone in church history who may have risked their lives, at the very least demonstrated a deep desire to possess the
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Word of God. And somehow, because when you think of all the things that could destroy a papyrus manuscript over the course of 1 ,800 years, there's a lot of stuff.
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But somehow, that, amongst all those manuscripts that were produced back then, is still in our possession today.
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And we're very thankful to have it. But I'm thankful for the person. And that's what I was thinking of in 1993, as we left that exhibit.
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We just walked through the rest of it. It's like, whatever. And got out of there, because that's why I'd gone. There, the connection that I felt between myself and that scribe.
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Because I could have, I didn't bring it with me. I wish I had at that time. But I had my Nessie Allen 27th edition of the
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Greek New Testament. I could have reproduced all of his readings from my Greek New Testament. That's how complete a critical edition of the
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Greek New Testament is today. It would have told me all the readings in his manuscript. And this is material
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I've studied. I had spent years, when I was in Bible college, I wrote this huge paper on the
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Granville Sharp construction. So I had examined that stuff. And here, 1800 years later, here is this connection to someone that I won't know until eternity.
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I think I'll find out if I want to, I suppose, in eternity who wrote that. But there were
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Christians, we don't know, 99 .9999 % of the believers who've gone before us.
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Their names are not recorded. They're recorded in heaven, but they're not recorded here. And by the way,
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I'm from Apologia Church. We have so many babies at Apologia Church, none of them can distract me. So just simply don't worry about any, it's cool.
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We got to get the hiccups going there on the little one. I understand that. Okay, there you go. You're doing good. See, it's sort of natural.
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Just there you go. God designed us to know how to get rid of them hiccups. Yep, there you go. I'm even a grandpa and I still know how to do that.
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So yeah, anyway. So there's my thinking. There is someone who loved the
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Word of God. I love the Word of God. We are still connected after 1800 years.
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Did he dress like me? No. Did he speak my language? Of course not. My language didn't exist then. Might he have had different practices and he was singing different songs that may have looked different?
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Yeah. But we have a connection that when the world looks back at history, the only connection they have when they look back, people that are either common interests or a common humanity, but not that kind of connection.
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Not that kind of connection. So even the people that we don't know, you have a connection to them and you may meet them someday and there may be many generations after us who will have connections to us.
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See, it's easy for us. Now, I know where the elders are here. Some of you may know that over the past year,
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I finally got my eschatology straightened out and I heard a few people going,
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Did anybody see the dividing line I did yesterday? Just anybody? Okay. Did you see the shirt I had on? It said
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Dat Post Mill. And so one of my pre -mill friends on Twitter said, man, that was great content on the
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DL today, but man, that t -shirt. Sorry. If it said
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Tim LaHaye, would it have made you feel any better? I don't know. But it's easy for us to look back and go, look at what that person did back there that has blessed me today.
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Here's the challenge. How do we live in such a way to bless the generations coming after us?
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There is the question. When we were seeing a mighty fortress, did you hear the last verse?
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Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill,
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God's truth abideth still. Man, those words all of a sudden have meaning that they've never had for American Christians before.
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And they had meaning for Luther. Luther was this close to death many times.
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And we may be facing situations like that. So we look back, we look at the bravery of people who stood firm in the face of persecution in the past.
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Might that be another reason for us to think through how we're going to respond to things in our day?
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If we are of the opinion that there's never going to be anybody after us, then you don't have as much of a reason to stand firm.
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But I'm looking at a little teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny one. How, how, when was that thing?
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Did you, are you all, are you all, are you all just coming back from the hospital or what? How, how old?
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Month and a half. All right. Okay. Well, guess what? In the natural course of events, that little one is going to have other little ones.
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And then one after that. And so how do we live today to communicate through to them?
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That's the biggest thing for me right now. That's the biggest thing for me right now. I have grandchildren. Nothing has changed me more than grandchildren.
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Being, getting one of those little things changes you a lot because they're very demanding. They are
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God's way of sucking the selfishness right out of you because they are the center of the universe.
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They are a black hole of selfishness. God designed it that way. That's great.
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But nothing changed my perspective of the future more than having grandchildren.
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Because all of a sudden when your babies have babies, you realize that the circle of life in Disney was not all that far off.
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It's actually has some truth to it. It's going to continue on. So there's the first guy. Second guy
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I want to talk to you about is a man by the name, well, actually let's stay with the anonymous people for a second, okay?
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Before I give you a name, let's talk about an anonymous person. There is an epistle, and man,
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I put way too much text in here, but there is an epistle that it's called the Epistle to Diognetus.
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Sometimes its author is called Mothetes. Anyone know what Mothetes means in Greek? Thank you.
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Very good. Who said that? Put your hand up. Go ahead. Who said disciple? There you go.
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All right. Okay. One of the old men in the group. And that's what everybody was telling me.
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And I'm like, he's younger than my youngest, and they're calling him the old guy. But anyways, disciple. And so that wasn't his name, but that's how he's identified.
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He is the disciple of Christ who wrote an epistle to an unbeliever by the name of Diognetus. We don't know when.
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I think it was around 125 -ish is probably the best guess I would give, given the background of the epistle and things like that.
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It's a great epistle. Look it up sometime. Read it. It's fragmentary, but most of it's there. The arguments are awesome.
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It's really fascinating to listen to a Christian talking to a non -Christian
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Roman at the beginning of the second century, and how he communicated his faith, and how he engaged in, and how they had to engage in apologetics as part of the presentation of the gospel.
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Really, really good stuff. Really, really good stuff. But I want to read you part of the epistle of Diognetus, and see what you think of what he has to say.
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So then, having already planned everything in his mind together with his child, that is the son, he permitted us during the former time to be carried away by undisciplined impulses as we desired, led astray by pleasures and lusts, not all because he took delight in our sins, but because he was patient.
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Not because he approved of that former season of unrighteousness, but because he was creating the present season of righteousness, in order that we who in the former time were convicted by our own deeds as unworthy of life, might now by the goodness of God be made worthy, and having clearly demonstrated our inability to enter the kingdom of God on our own, might be enabled to do so by God's power.
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But when our unrighteousness was fulfilled, and it had been made perfectly clear that its wages, punishment and death, were to be expected, then the season arrived during which
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God had decided to reveal at last his goodness and power, oh, the surpassing kindness and love of God.
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He did not hate us or reject us or bear a grudge against us. Instead, he was patient and forbearing, and his mercy he took upon himself our sins.
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He himself gave us his own son as a ransom for us, the holy one for the lawless, the guiltless for the guilty, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal.
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For what else but his righteousness could have covered our sins? In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly, to be justified except in the
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Son of God alone? Oh, the sweet exchange! Oh, the incomprehensible work of God!
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Oh, the unexpected blessings that the sinfulness of many should be hidden in one righteous person, while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners.
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Having demonstrated, therefore, in the former time the powerlessness of our nature to obtain life, and having now revealed the
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Savior's power to save even the powerless, he willed that for both these reasons we should believe in his goodness and regard him as nurse, father, teacher, counselor, healer, mind, light, honor, glory, strength in life, and not be anxious about food and clothing.
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Now, that's good preaching, but what you need to hear is hopefully what you heard him preaching was justification by faith, the imputed righteousness of Christ, our imputation of our sins to Christ, he bears our sins, his righteousness is imputed to us, and when is this?
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Oh, that's something Martin Luther made up. No, this is about 1400 years before Martin Luther.
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So, Luther was simply banging a drum that had been built a long time ago, and it may have become somewhat neglected over the years because of tradition, but it wasn't a new musical instrument.
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He was presenting, we'll have some questions at the end, Diognetus, D -I -O -G -N -E -T -U -S,
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Diognetus. So, these doctrines and teachings, we're often told sola scriptura, sola fide, all these things came along at a later point in time.
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Fact of the matter is, you dig enough, you do enough research, you do enough reading of original sources, and you discover that that is not the case.
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So, check that one out, especially his presentation on the folly of idolatry.
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It's really, really good reading. It's a whole lot better than almost anything that you'll be watching on TV other than that tonight,
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I assure you of that. So, let's talk about someone whose name we do know. Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius of Antioch.
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He was the bishop of the church at Antioch, and of course we know that was a major Christian center. We see it in the book of Acts and so on and so forth, a very early church.
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Ignatius of Antioch was martyred somewhere between 107 and 108 AD, so right at the beginning of the second century.
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So, he is living in the decades right after the last apostles. So, it's very early on in the history of the church, and once he's arrested, he is basically dragged along, willingly.
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He wants to go, but he goes all the way from the area around Antioch all the way to Rome.
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So, it's a fairly decent trip. Even today, it's a fairly decent trip. It was a longer trip back then, obviously, because he was so well known that they wanted to take him to Rome for his execution, and along the way, he wrote seven epistles to churches and to one individual,
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Polycarp, as he is going. Now, there's some fake epistles that were written later and had his name put on it, but there are seven genuine epistles, and I recommend them to your reading.
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They are fascinating. We went through all of them in the classroom teaching tomorrow in Germany.
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We've already gone through all of Ignatius' stuff. There's just some tremendous citations.
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I'll only share two of them with you right now that are just fascinating.
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This, I think, is one of my favorite quotations from all of church history, and this is how it goes.
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There is one physician—this is written to the church at Ephesus, by the way—there is one physician of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate,
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God and man, true life and death, of Mary and of God, first passable and then impassable,
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Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, that's written before 107
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AD. Now, if you're missing what the significance of that is, if you go to any university, college in the
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Western world today, you will be told that the belief in the deity of Christ, belief in the doctrine of the
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Trinity, all of these things developed over time and then finally took shape in 325
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AD at the Council of Nicaea. But this wasn't what the early church believed.
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But here is one of the very earliest—I mean, the earliest fragments we have of Christian writings outside the
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New Testament are something called the Didache, Clement's letter from Rome to the church at Corinth, and Ignatius.
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These are our earliest fragments outside of the New Testament itself, okay?
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And so, in this early, early, early material, you have a highly developed what's called
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Christology, doctrine of Christ. One physician of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate,
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God and man—that's as close to saying the God -man as you're going to get—true life and death of Mary and of God, first passable and then impassable,
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Jesus Christ our Lord. That—I have to wonder in how many evangelical churches today if on a
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Sunday morning I just grabbed people out of the line as they were leaving the church after shaking the pastor's hand, if anybody still does that anymore, and said, give me in one sentence a meaningful description of Christ.
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How many would do any better than Ignatius of Antioch did around 107
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AD? Not many. Not many. And people say, well, you know, but they never thought of anything called the
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Trinity. Listen to this. Also in the same epistle to the Ephesians. You are stones of a temple which was beforehand prepared for a building of God the
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Father, being raised to the height through the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, and using as a rope the
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Holy Spirit. So here's the church, and the church is a building prepared by God the
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Father, raised to the heights of the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, using as a rope the
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Holy Spirit. It's a beautiful analogy, but it would make no sense if you were, for example, a
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Jehovah's Witness. Let's try to interpret this as a Jehovah's Witness.
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So the building of God the Father, who is Jehovah, being raised to the heights of the engine of Michael the
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Archangel, which is actually not the cross because Jesus didn't die on the cross. He died on a torture stake, and using as a rope the impersonal active force like water.
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Yeah, that doesn't work at all, does it? No. It would be a mess. The putting together of Father, Son, and Spirit, which is what you find all the way through the
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New Testament as well, demonstrates a fundamental foundational belief about the relationship that those divine persons bear to one another and their role in the work of the gospel.
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And so again, beginning of the second century, the decades right after the death of the last apostle, in -depth theology of Christ, in -depth theology of salvation, and this is being written by a man who's going to his death.
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He's not writing systematic theologies to these groups. He can assume that they're going to understand the language he's using.
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And so that means he's assuming that there's already this level of knowledge amongst everybody who's going to be hearing these letters that he's writing to them.
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So Ignatius of Antioch sealed his testimony with his blood. Dying as a martyr does not mean that what you believe is true, but when someone is willing to die for something, you better listen to what they had to say to see why they ended up believing what they believed.
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People have died as martyrs for falsehoods. No question about that. But when someone is willing to give their life, as the early
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Christians were willing to give theirs, you need to listen to what they were saying. Now, there's all sorts of other people that we could talk about in that early period, but we only have so much time.
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And so I wanted to go to another martyr. We could, for example, talk about Justin Martyr, who was an apologist and a defender of the
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Christian faith around the year 150. Now, obviously, when he was born, his mommy did not name him
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Justin Martyr. That obviously came later and tells you how he met his end as well.
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He'd be fascinating. Tertullian and all sorts of other folks. But down in South Africa, yeah, down in South Africa, where I've got a lot of friends.
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I'll never get to see them again either. But down in Africa, in Carthage. So Carthage, as you know, one of the great stories is the battles between Carthage and Rome for preeminence in the
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Mediterranean and things like that. And Hannibal and his elephants. I mean, history is fascinating stuff.
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It's so sad that most modern people are just bored out of their minds by the study of history.
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Well, they didn't have iPhones, so why should we care about them? This isn't sad. They didn't need iPhones to remind them to do everything that they did.
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Sort of makes us wonder about us. But anyway, Carthage had eventually been subdued by Rome.
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And there was a very wealthy, very powerful man by the name of Cyprian.
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Cyprian was very wealthy. He was dressed in purple. Purple clothing in that day was extremely expensive.
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It was a sign of great authority and culture and position in the culture and society. Well trained in rhetoric and well read and things like that.
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And as an adult, as an older adult, not older, older, but probably in his 40s, he heard the message of Christ.
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Now, this is during the period of time where Christianity is still called a religio illicita, an illicit or illegal religion.
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He hears the message of Christ and he bows the knee to Christ. He only lives a few years as a
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Christian before he is martyred. By the way, when
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I look back upon these men and I recognize that many of them lived a short period of time in Christ, I tend to be much more gracious toward their theology than I would be someone who is not under persecution and has 40 years to study.
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You know what I mean? There are people, I'll go ahead and name a name, Dave Hunt.
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Dave Hunt, I debated him. Well, I didn't debate him. I sort of, well, you know what happened. Um, you can read the book and you can go back and listen to the recordings.
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But Dave was one of those folks who held everybody in the past to his modern standard and was willing to just chuck people into the flames of hell if they didn't look like him and express everything the way he did.
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He really had a very, I think, surface level approach to church history. And I've tried to avoid that as one looking back and wanting to learn from these people.
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And at the same time recognizing that not everybody in the past has had everything exactly right.
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And I don't either. That's one of the reasons that I want to be gracious toward them. Anyway, you know,
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Keith Green. Anybody, Keith Green fans? You need to be, if you're not a Keith Green fan, I'm not going to speak to you ever again.
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But Keith Green was only a Christian for like seven years. And people pick on his theology and stuff like that.
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And I'm going, how long have you been a Christian again? Oh, okay. Well, then stop picking on somebody who was only a
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Christian for seven years. Cyprian, likewise, for a brief number of years, he did not want to become the
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Bishop of Carthage, but he was so generous. He just, he was a wealthy man.
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And so he began using all of his worldly wealth to support the church and to support the poor and to do these types of things.
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And there was persecution going on. And unfortunately, right at the time that he becomes
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Bishop of Carthage is when the Decian persecution begins. And it's extremely severe. And so he actually flees
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Carthage. This was a big issue in the early church. Should you flee? It caused tremendous difficulties in the church.
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And for a while ran the church by epistle from outside of Carthage.
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That didn't work out too well. He returned. He eventually was arrested and in 254 laid his head upon a stone and a
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Roman soldier cut his head off with a sword. During that period of time, he wrote an epistle that I would highly recommend to all of you.
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I think it's 73 off top of my head. I'd have to look it back up again. Epistle 73.
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Probably can find it on ccel .org if you look for it. He wrote an epistle to Christians who had been imprisoned by Rome in the mines.
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Now, can you imagine what it was like to work in a mine in North Africa in the middle of the third century, around 253?
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I don't think there was much in the way of safety protocols, if you know what I mean. It was probably meant to kill as many people as possible.
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But they were enslaved for their faith, digging ore for the
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Roman Empire in mines, knowing that any one of them could get out of that simply by denying
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Christ. Just as we have brothers and sisters today in prisons in Islamic countries that all they have to do would be to say the
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Shahada. All they have to do would be to confess that Allah is the only
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God to be worshipped and Muhammad is his prophet and they'd be out. They hold the key to the door that locks them in.
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They're in the same situation. So he writes to them, and this is one paragraph from his epistle to the
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Christians in the mines. And I want you to hear what it says. But that, being first severely beaten with clubs and ill -used, you have begun by sufferings of that kind, the glorious firstlings of your confession, is not a matter to be execrated by us.
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For a Christian body is not very greatly terrified at clubs, seeing all its hope is in the wood.
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The servant of Christ acknowledges the sacrament of his salvation, redeemed by wood to life eternal.
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He is advanced by wood to the crown. But what wonder if, as gold and silver vessels, you have been committed to the mine that is the home of gold and silver, except that now the nature of the mines is changed and the places which previously had been accustomed to yield gold and silver have begun to receive them.
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Moreover, they have put fetters on your feet and have bound your blessed limbs and the temples of God with disgraceful chains, as if the spirit also could be bound with the body or your gold could be stained by the contact of iron.
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To men who are dedicated to God and attesting their faith with religious courage, such things are ornaments, not chains.
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Nor do they bind the feet of the Christians for infamy, but glorify them for a crown.
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O feet blessedly bound, which are loose, not by the smith, but by the Lord. O feet blessedly bound, which are guided to paradise in the way of salvation.
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O feet bound for the present time in the world, that they may be always free with the
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Lord. O feet lingering for a while among the fetters and crossbars, but to run quickly to Christ on a glorious road.
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Let cruelty, either envious or malignant, hold you here in its bonds and chains as long as it will.
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From this earth and from these sufferings you shall speedily come to the kingdom of heaven. The body is not cherished in the mines with couch and cushions, but it is cherished with the refreshment and solace of Christ.
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The frame wearied with labors lies prostrate on the ground, but it is no penalty to lie down with Christ.
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Your limbs unbathed are foul and disfigured with filth and dirt, but within they are spiritually cleansed, although without the flesh is defiled.
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There the bread is scarce, but man liveth not by bread alone, but by the word of God. Shivering you want clothing, but he who puts on Christ is both abundantly clothed and adorned.
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The hair of your half -shorn beard seems repulsive, but since Christ is the head of the man, anything whatever must needs become that head which is illustrious on account of Christ's name.
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All that deformity, detestable and foul to Gentiles, with what splendor shall it be recompensed?
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This temporal and brief suffering, how shall it be exchanged for the reward of a bright and eternal honor when according to the word of the blessed apostle, the
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Lord shall change the body of our humiliation that it may be fashioned like to the body of his brightness.
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Cyprian wasn't pretending that these people were not in chains, they were not being beaten.
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He was not in any way minimizing the sufferings that were theirs, but every word he communicated echoed the apostle
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Paul's statement, the sufferings of this life are not to be compared to the glories that will be revealed.
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And if he had finished his days on cushions of comfort, that might impact how we read his word.
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But he willfully laid his head upon a block and had a Roman soldier sever that head from his body.
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With still many years he could have lived. That changes how you interpret his words.
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He lived what he said. I don't know any of those people, well actually the beginning of the letter does mention just a few names of the people who were in those chains in the mines, but we don't know the vast majority of them.
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I don't know about the rest of you, but I think about someday meeting some of those people and I have to think about and feel ashamed by the things
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I complain about in my life. The things
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I've gone to the Lord, Lord why have you allowed this to happen to me? Why have you allowed that to happen to me?
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And then I think about all those who've gone before and I think about those in the mines and I go what do
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I have to complain about? And I've preached sermons on the the gem of Christian contentment, the one thing we never ever talk about because in the
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United States you're not supposed to be content so you're always buying new stuff, right? And yet what a strong people are created by a people who are content with God's providence in their life.
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So reading church history can give you lots of reason to look at yourself and go would you grow up?
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I find myself saying that not only to myself but to my entire country these days to be perfectly honest with you.
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Early church, we feel disconnected from them.
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One of the first people in the early church that I really felt a deep connection to in my study of church history was the great
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Athanasius. Athanasius was at the
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Council of Nicaea in 325. By the way if you ever take a church history class from me on every final exam, one thing you absolutely must know is the date of the
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Council of Nicaea. So just tattoo it someplace, whatever you need to do, 325.
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Almost anything you will read about the Council of Nicaea on the internet or listen to on YouTube is a lie.
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I've almost never heard anything in church history lied about more than the
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Council of Nicaea. Well they determined the New Testament canon there, never discussed it. They threw out all the apocryphal gospel, never discussed it.
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It's just astonishing the lies that I hear about the Council. By the way, if you want to google it, what really happened to the
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Council of Nicaea from the CRI journal a number of years ago back when I was still friendly with CRI. That was before the head of the
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CRI became Eastern Orthodox but anyways it's still out there. What really happened to the Council of Nicaea? I wrote it and hopefully it'll be helpful to you if you want to really know what happened at that particular instance.
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But anyway, Athanasius was there but Athanasius, people will say, well Athanasius was a bishop at Nicaea and he sort of pushed the deity of Christ.
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That's not true, he wasn't even a bishop yet. He was there as an assistant to Alexander, his bishop from Alexander who died shortly thereafter.
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If you know about church history, very briefly, very very quickly, only a few years after Nicaea, the politics in the
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Roman Empire changed. And the Arians, the people who denied the full deity of Christ, who had been repudiated at Nicaea came back into favor with the
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Roman Empire and for about 40 years, as Jerome put it, the world woke up and was shocked to find itself
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Arian. And so the Council of Nicaea was not seen to be the be -all end -all of all things and in fact,
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Sirmium, Ariminum, other councils met after Nicaea that contradicted Nicaea. Most people don't know that.
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Eventually, pretty much everybody gave in, even the Bishop of Rome. But there was one guy and we're told he was short, wasn't very good -looking, maybe another reason why
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I like him, sort of a connection there. And there is five times
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Athanasius was kicked out of his church by Roman soldiers rushing in the front door while he was rushing out the back.
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The story is told that once he was under a monk's cowl in the back of a small boat going one way on the
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Nile and Roman soldiers who were looking for him were in a boat going the other way on the Nile and they yelled over, have you seen
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Athanasius? And Athanasius under his cowl goes, you can't be far. I like that guy.
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He outlasted the Arians and he out -argued the Arians. You read his books against the
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Arians. And what initially drew me to him was here is a man in the middle of the fourth century arguing against people who deny the deed of Christ using the exact same inspired texts that I, as a young man, had been using in debating with Jehovah's Witnesses and with Mormons.
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Nothing had changed. The issues were the same, but here's someone long before me saying the same things
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I'm saying. There's something beautiful about that and there's something extremely encouraging about that. I think one of the things that modern day
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Christians really lose when they don't have the connection to history, they don't read this stuff, is the stability that comes from recognizing, well, what
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Jude said, the once for all delivered the saints faith. The world can't change it.
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The world wants to change. I hear the Chinese are coming up with their own Bible translation to fit with communism. Yeah, right.
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That'll do real well. No, it won't. People have tried that before. You can't change the faith in that way because God is the one who is accomplishing his purpose.
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That connection and that stability is something that I can teach to my grandchildren.
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I can pass that on. That's something. This intersectionality we're doing today, which divides everybody from everybody.
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I mean, when you take intersectionality all the way down to its final, you are alone because you have to be the ultimate victim.
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And so it doesn't matter if it's your next door neighbor who looks just like you and has the same level of education as you and gets the same amount of money as you.
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You've still got to find some way to differentiate yourself from that person and be divided from them. All this stuff can never build a society, it can only destroy it.
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The beauty is in the church. We have a message that's not only for all people, every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, but it's for every generation.
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It's from every generation. And so when I read Athanasius and I see him going into Colossians chapter one, it's like, go get him.
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Go get him, Athanasius. I know what's coming. And that connection is thrilling to me.
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It's thrilling to me. And hopefully it's thrilling to you as well to recognize that you stand.
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You stand in a long line. Christ has been building his church. I love the fact that I met with the elders tonight.
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We had wonderful fun. And by the way, whoever made that beef, could I get the recipe?
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That was real. Oh, that was really good. That was, would that be something
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I could make in the fifth wheel maybe? I'd like to, I'd like to, like to, that was good.
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I met with all these guys. They're all younger than my youngest child. I think that's great.
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I think that's awesome. I'm going to get old and I'm going to croak. And you know what? The day after I die, the kingdom's just going to keep right on going.
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You ever meet anybody who thinks the kingdom is dependent upon them and upon you giving them money?
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Run. I've seen far too many of them down through my life. Far too many of them.
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But the encouraging thing to me is here's the next generation. I didn't raise them up.
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The Lord's used me to be some encouragement to them on some level, but it's going to keep on going.
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It's going to keep on going. And I want to invest down that road into the little ones running around between the pews out there who will never remember the weird guy in the loud shirt, but they might read a book someday and go, hey, that actually helped me.
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Good. That's what it's all about. The people before us, there was a great Steve Green song.
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I don't know if any of you know who Steve Green was, but he was big in my day. Actually, we both went to Green Canyon College, so he was a couple years ahead of me.
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Anyways, and it talks about those who've gone before us, have left signs to encourage us.
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So let me live a life to encourage those who will come behind me. And that takes wisdom.
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That takes a spirit -born wisdom. And it doesn't mean you have to do big, huge, great things.
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Let me tell you something, and then we'll take some questions and wrap up. I had the opportunity before coronavirus to travel the world.
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In 2019, I flew 165 ,000 miles. I taught Melbourne, Australia, Samara, Russia, Durban, South Africa, and all over London.
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And I have partaken of the Lord's Supper with people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds and in all sorts of different languages, sometimes languages
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I can understand, sometimes languages I couldn't. I've seen the church in its expression, not all over the world, but in many parts of the world.
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And one of the first things that truly encouraged me when I started traveling internationally in 2005 was to recognize what binds us together, what unites us.
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We focus upon the things that divide us. We shouldn't. It's that common faith that binds us together.
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And I know that what I want to do is encourage people to recognize that your daily faithfulness, your faithfulness in praying for your pastor, your faithfulness in being there to hear the ministry of the
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Word, your faithfulness to partake of the supper, to proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
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Every time you do that, whether you recognize it or not, and whether you just go, it's just me, it's just me and my family, you are swinging a spiritual sledgehammer at the gates of hell.
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Because remember, they will not prevail. And what you need to understand about that is gates were defensive.
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We're breaking through. They're not coming after us. We think of it, the gates of hell should not prevail against it.
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We think the gates of hell are somehow invading heaven. Gates don't go anywhere, folks.
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They're defensive. And they will not withstand the onslaught of God's truth.
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And we seem to think that we need to do something like a John Calvin and write some massive thing like the
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Institutes. It's been a great blessing to me and blessing the thousands of others, but the reality is the vast majority of God's people never do anything that big.
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Someday when the books are opened and the stories told, it's going to be the godly mothers who changed diapers and took care of sick kids, but then taught them about Jesus and modeled what it meant to follow him.
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They're going to be the big names. And a lot of the people we think of the big names, they're going to be a footnote.
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They're going to be a footnote. The mommies that raised them to be those big names will end up being the real big names.
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We don't know most of them. We don't know most of them. So there's much more that could be said, but we have come to the point where we'll take a few questions and then we'll, wow, okay.
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Any questions? I woke up this morning.
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Yes. The question is, as a church historian that tries to claim that the church believed this, they believed that it was sensationalist, they believed it.
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What did you find in your search, in a process, what did you find in your search of these old -time
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Christians? What did they believe about Jesus Christ? Nothing like an easy one, huh?
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Yes, I was going to say, ask me a question I can answer in 30 seconds or so, so we can wrap up this evening.
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I can only be very, very surface level at this point.
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When it comes to eschatology, we need to recognize that in church history there were periods where a particular method of interpretation became predominant and influenced things.
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So, for example, most people are shocked to discover that the first full -length treatise on the subject of the atonement does not come until the late 4th century.
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And we go, that's central. How could centuries pass without someone writing a full book on that subject?
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The issues that were in the forefront of the theological thinking of the church, sometimes, by the way, differed between East and West, but certainly
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Christological issues and Trinitarian issues had to come before a lot of other things. A man named
57:45
Origen, at the beginning of the 3rd century, had a particularly pernicious and negative influence upon the church in the allegorization of the
57:59
Old Testament text. And honestly, from his point on until the
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Reformation, there is a crippling of the interpretation of the
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Bible as a whole because of a diminishment of a recognition of the full inspiration of the
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Old Testament, thanks to Origen. And it was the Reformers who pushed us back to viewing the
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Old Testament the way the apostles did and interpreting it in what we would call a grammatical historical context.
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All of that to say that if soteriology, atonement, issues related to that, could be put off until later discussion and then influenced by stuff like that, eschatology all the more.
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And so there are very clearly millenarian views in the early centuries.
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But let's remember something else. This is why this is a very long answer and I can only touch on a few issues to consider.
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Which book of the New Testament do we have the fewest extant manuscripts of?
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Revelation. Some of you have been listening to the dividing line. Very good. Revelation.
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Now, why is that? Because Revelation struggled for acceptance into the functioning canon of the church in many parts of the church.
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And I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't think the early church should have been sitting around going, well we only have one book with ten -headed monsters and seven -headed beasts.
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Can we get some more? We need some more books like that. Can we find some more? They didn't need to be doing that. So that's not a slam on Revelation, though I would tell you all the way through the
59:58
Reformation there were a number of people that continued to question the inspiration of Revelation. Erasmus, who put together what's the foundation of the
01:00:09
King James New Testament, clearly disrespected Revelation greatly. And I think if he had been a little bit more honest would have said, let's get rid of this.
01:00:18
So there were people like that. But the point is, in those first centuries you don't even have necessarily yet a completed canon for certain parts of the church.
01:00:32
So especially when it comes to eschatology you could see how that would influence all sorts of things.
01:00:39
What would your theology look like if you only had seven epistles of Paul, you didn't have
01:00:46
Hebrews, you didn't have Revelation? Because especially when it comes to eschatological issues you are tying the whole counsel of God together.
01:00:55
And if you don't have all of it you can end up with skewed perspectives. And so there are extensive books on this subject.
01:01:08
And I think having listened to my betters in the field, they would say that it takes the whole counsel of God to come to these conclusions.
01:01:25
And that there are people who clearly had a firm confidence in the full victory of Christ's kingdom over time.
01:01:33
But there are people who had that but then also had other traditions about a thousand year reign or something like that.
01:01:43
And it just wasn't yet the focus to try to come to consistency on those things.
01:01:51
And we want to try to think, well, everybody thought these things through. How much time do you think
01:01:57
Cyprian had to do eschatology? In seven years of his Christian life? Not a lot.
01:02:05
Not a lot. So we have to be careful when we read early church fathers.
01:02:11
You can read them and go, it seems they were influenced by this perspective. But very frequently we only have this much of what they wrote.
01:02:19
You've got to be really careful because they may have talked a whole lot about it in this that they wrote, we don't have that anymore.
01:02:25
And they didn't figure they had to talk about it because they already wrote the other stuff. They're not thinking about what we're going to be reading 2 ,000 years later.
01:02:32
And so be very, very careful. For me, on all these issues, I'm a biblical
01:02:38
Trinitarian. I'm a Trinitarian because the Bible teaches it. I can very much appreciate what Ignatius said.
01:02:43
I can very much appreciate what happens to the Council of Nicaea. I'm not trying to divorce myself from any of those things. But the fundamental foundational reason has to be it's what's taught by Scripture.
01:02:53
And so I can deeply influence, be deeply appreciative of individuals in church history.
01:03:03
And at the same time go on that subject, they were out to lunch. And I can not only do that with church history, but I've sort of given some good examples most of you know about of having friendships with brothers in Christ with whom
01:03:21
I have strong disagreements. And thankfully, most of them return the favor. So most of you know where I preached
01:03:29
Sunday, Christ Church, Moscow. Early service, the preacher was
01:03:35
Doug Wilson. Second service was me. Now I'm going back up there in probably
01:03:41
March of next year. And guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to be debating Doug. We are going to do two debates back in March of 2020 on paedo -communion and the textual issues.
01:03:53
And we're going to do them next year. And now that I can drive a fifth wheel and get it where it's supposed to go and everything else.
01:04:02
So yeah, so that's the plan. We have disagreements, but man, we spent hours talking this weekend and it was sweet fellowship.
01:04:13
It was wonderful. Even when we had to disagree with one another. You know, we're always dancing around the baptism issue, you know. So I was on CrossPolitik and Chocolate Knox is sitting there going, have you baptized your babies?
01:04:28
I was expecting that one. And they didn't want to go any farther with that one. So yeah, so we could have disagreements.
01:04:34
And most of you know I'm friends with Michael Brown and he and I have debated each other. We've debated against each other more often than we've debated on the same side, but it's a wonderful thing to do that kind of thing.
01:04:43
So I think I'm being consistent, trying to live it out and also looking back in history and going, here's somebody.
01:04:51
We disagree here, here and here, but man, were they spot on here and I can be edified by that. So there, but there are some much better answers to that by people who've done in -depth stuff that you could probably ask
01:05:04
Gary DeMar to give you a bibliography. Yes, real quick. What's the name of my new book?
01:05:15
I was thinking about doing a book and then Joe Boot wrote it.
01:05:23
In other words, Joe Boot has a book coming out. I shouldn't say this publicly.
01:05:28
I wrote the endorsement for the book yesterday on US 95
01:05:35
South at about 65 miles per hour. I used voice dictation because I had forgotten to do it the night before.
01:05:43
They needed it in. And so I'm literally using voice dictation. Then it's sort of like, okay, you know, tap back.
01:05:54
Okay, let's try this. And so I wrote the endorsement for it. He has a book coming out. The title that I saw was
01:06:01
Ruler of Kings. If you don't know who Joe Boot is, Joe Boot is a English man living in Canada, head of the
01:06:09
Ezra Institute. He wrote a fantastic book called
01:06:15
The Mission of God. How many of you know The Mission of God? All right. This is good, The Mission of God, and it's only about 140 pages long.
01:06:22
And it is about the relationship of Christ and the church to the state. Written while being threatened with being arrested in Canada.
01:06:32
That sort of sharpens the knife a little bit. So that book is going to be awesome.
01:06:42
For me, the CBGM databases on Mark came out two weeks ago.
01:06:49
And if any of you know me, I had a project I was working on that was put on hold until that could happen.
01:06:58
And it's happened. And I'm really struggling, honestly, with the fact that I still feel that this is something
01:07:06
I need to do. Most people don't understand it. But it's something I need to do.
01:07:12
And now that information is available. And so what do I do? And since Joe's written a book that pretty much handled everything
01:07:19
I was going to say, I'll probably press on with that project. I think that would have the longest lasting benefit.
01:07:26
Yes, sir. So I think undoubtedly, yeah, what are some books?
01:07:47
I am openly biased here. But my recommendation for everybody is the set of books by my dear friend
01:08:03
Nick Needham. Dr. Nick Needham teaches up in Inverness, Scotland.
01:08:09
And his 2000 Years of Christ's Power, I think it's four volumes right now, may have been a fifth, or he's working on the fifth.
01:08:18
I don't remember which. But it is very easy reading.
01:08:27
Not simplistic, but very easy reading. It's easier to read than Schaff. Schaff obviously is the standard.
01:08:34
Even though it's old, it's still really, really, really good. There are some one volumes and two volume works.
01:08:42
And normally what you can do is you can find a one volume on a particular period, like on the Reformation. Chadwick's work on the early church, the
01:08:49
Reformation, those are really good. But a lot of the one volume church histories as a whole,
01:08:59
I just don't think you can do that. You miss too many of the connections. Too much stuff ends up getting missed.
01:09:06
And it sort of ends up being scattered, in my opinion. So Needham, Schaff, and then individual volumes on particular subjects, individuals, things like that is what
01:09:21
I would recommend. And there's lots of good movies out there now too. And lots of bad ones.
01:09:27
Yeah. I think you mean 39th.
01:09:42
It's okay. It's all right. We will not condemn you for missing which festal letter. Most people are going, what is a festal letter?
01:09:59
Real quick on that one. And I'll do one question after this. Then we'll say good night.
01:10:08
The most accessible thing to help with the overarching idea of canon.
01:10:16
Did you see what Dr. Kruger and I did? Yeah. Okay. That's what I recommend to people. If you go on YouTube, two
01:10:23
G3s ago, I think, Dr. Kruger and I, Dr.
01:10:28
Kruger is the president of RTS in Charlotte, did a presentation on the issue of the canon and how the canon is a theological issue, first and foremost.
01:10:41
And that's something a lot of people miss and a lot of people struggle with. Why are there only 27 books in New Testament? Why did some books struggle for acceptance?
01:10:48
What about books that were mentioned that were not eventually a part of the canon, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You've got that.
01:10:56
You've got his books. He has two or three books on that subject. My book, Scripture Alone, has two or three chapters on that subject.
01:11:04
But clearly Athanasius is a witness to a very, very clear canon at that point in time.
01:11:14
And that's consistent with the Muratorian Fragment and things that came before it. So it is not that the church was creating canon.
01:11:24
The church was recognizing canon. I think that is borne out by not only what
01:11:29
Athanasius says, but everybody else is discussing that at that point and Jerome after him as well. So one more.
01:11:36
Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah.
01:12:11
I've noticed that a lot of the, there's been a lot of churches that have left the oneness
01:12:18
Pentecostal movement over the past 20 years. And many of them end up in their statements of faith, basically saying, some people say this, some people say that, we're really not sure, that type of thing.
01:12:33
If you've read the Forgotten Trinity, I think that the scriptures are very clear on the subject, not in the provision of a nice, easy creedal formulation, but in the three fundamental foundational doctrines that the
01:12:47
Bible teaches. In fact, there's one true God, the distinction between the divine persons and the equality of those persons.
01:12:54
So if someone says it's not clear enough to distinguish between Trinity and modalism, of course it is.
01:13:03
It has to be, or we have no idea what God we're worshiping. It's very, very clear in identifying
01:13:10
Jesus as a divine person who pre -existed his birth in Bethlehem. So much for modalism. That's it.
01:13:16
So if you believe in sola scriptura and tota scriptura, scripture is the sole and fallible rule of faith, tota scriptura, believe all of scripture, then yes, it is most definitely clear enough to demonstrate that polytheism is an error, subordinationism is an error, modalism is an error, and as I explain in the
01:13:36
Forgotten Trinity, those are the three errors that result when you deny any one of those three foundational doctrines.
01:13:43
They then define the parameters of the doctrine of the Trinity. Now, are there some levels of speculation that we have gone to that you'd have to go, well,
01:13:57
I can't call that a biblical conclusion. It's just extended reasoning upon previous issues.
01:14:07
Yeah, and I think we need to be very careful about that, and that's what I appreciate about Calvin and Calvin's discussion on that.
01:14:13
I won't go into that right now, but when I started this trip, seems like a lifetime ago, when
01:14:18
I started this trip, one of the first programs I did was talking about this and Calvin's discussion of it.
01:14:25
I think you'd find that to be useful if you look that up. So I hope that this brief little tour of some of the believers who've gone before us, some of whom we know their names and some of whom we have not, has whetted your appetite.
01:14:46
There are the good, bad, and the ugly in church history just as there are today. I could have gone through a rogues gallery of people in church history where we just want to go, do we really have to claim them at all?
01:15:00
There are those too, but we should be thankful for those who have gone before us, and we should be praying that we will be those who will encourage those who will come after us as well.
01:15:16
So let's close our time with a word of prayer. Indeed our Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have given us this opportunity to gather here in Las Vegas to consider what you've done.
01:15:32
When each one of the men that we've discussed lived, there was absolutely nothing in Las Vegas.
01:15:41
There was nothing here. And yet now, all these years later, here we are, and here you are invading this place with your truth.
01:15:53
We thank you that we're a part of this. Give us wisdom to live faithfully for you.
01:16:00
Give us confidence that we may not see in our lifetime the seed that we're sowing, but that since we have benefited so much from those who've come before us,
01:16:13
Lord, help us to sow that seed for those who will come after us. We pray these things in Christ's name.