Through The Church Age (part 4)

Our Father in heaven, what a blessing it is to be here this morning, to be able to worship you, to be able to reflect on your goodness to us, on your goodness to us through the work of your

Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, as he has, over the centuries, built his church against all obstacles and opposition.

Lord, as we look to your word, as we look to church history, we just pray that we'd be both encouraged and informed, knowing that there really is nothing new under the sun, but that Satan continues to recycle the same old fabrications again and again and again, hoping to certainly lead astray the world, but if possible, also to lead astray even the elect of God.

Father, we thank you that that's not possible, that you keep us, that your

Son keeps us, that your Spirit keeps us. Father, that we are secure. Encourage us again.

Remind us of the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen. Well, so last week we were, we've been talking about early church history, second century, early second century.

We were talking about Polycarp and some different people and their sad endings, but how they responded, even to their own death.

I like what Polycarp says as, you know, he's threatened with fire and his last words were, you know, why are you waiting?

Why do you tarry? Bring forth what you will. Bold. So we're talking about persecution that the world brought against the church, but there's another element that would seem to stop the spread of Christianity, and that is false teaching.

And really it is remarkable if you think about it, and I probably said this before, but I like to, you know, boggle my

Mormon friends' minds with this. Jesus said, Matthew 16, 18, basically the scripture

I think I started this whole series with, which is Jesus saying, upon this rock I will build my church.

And he says, to straighten it out a little bit, not that it needs straightening out, he says, you know, nothing will stop me.

And he says, even the gates of death or hell or Hades will not stop the building of his church.

What did he mean by that? Basically, it's this idea that it's not going to be unopposed.

This isn't like building your own house or something where, you know, I mean, just imagine that.

You're trying to add on to your house or something like that, and your neighbors are like shooting flaming arrows at your house.

And that's the idea, right? Jesus says, I'm going to build my church, and guess what?

Satan isn't going to like that. The world system isn't going to like that. They're going to bring things against the church to try to stop me from building my church.

So. Opposition, persecution, false teaching.

And my message to the Mormons is Jesus said he would build his church and nothing would stop him. The Mormons say, well, wait a minute.

After the apostles died out, the truth died out. And there was, you know, a vacuum.

The church did not exist for seventeen hundred years until Joseph Smith came along.

So if you have any Mormon friends, here's the question for them. Who's lying,

Joseph Smith or Jesus? That's a pretty tough one.

And, you know, my cousin, the returned missionary, who's a fervent Mormon, says, I don't know.

Let me get back to you on that. I mean, you know, there is no answer for it. And ultimately what they'll say is something along the lines of, well, all

I know is I had a burning. I had an experience and nobody can take that experience away from me.

So take that for what it's worth. All right. False teaching. And we'll get to this quiz here in just a moment.

In fact, I can start handing it out. Anybody know what? Did we talk about syncretism last week?

I don't know if we mentioned. I don't think we did. I'll just give you the whole stack and you can do with it what you will.

Syncretism. What is syncretism? We mentioned it. OK. We probably stopped right about there,

Gary. OK.

Different religions, different things kind of put together, you know, almost absorbing.

We talked. I remember we did talk about the Borg and I said I wanted to write my thesis on, you know, compare and contrast the

Roman Catholic Church and the Borg. Because there really is no difference. Sorry.

And Sinclair Ferguson said, talking about, well, let me just back up a little bit.

I mentioned that the Roman Catholic Church has a different flavor depending on where you are. You know, if you're in Cuba, they've taken some of the

Cuban. Culture, the Cuban gods, and they've mashed that into Roman Catholicism.

If you're in Japan, they sort of mash that into Roman Catholicism, depending on where you are. It's a little bit different.

But ultimately, what we don't want to do is we don't want to be guilty of taking. Kind of a worldly understanding or letting the culture impact us.

I read. I think it was last Sunday morning.

There's a particular church in Dallas where the pastor is really well known as a conservative evangelical.

He'll appear on TV and different things like that. And what he was going to do was interview a political figure about her testimony.

And that was going to be their Sunday morning service. And I thought, who would do that? We're not going to preach the word.

We're going to have an interview, an interview show. I don't I don't get that. Really odd.

So we don't want to be people who take the culture and absorb it into the church. But anyway, Gnosticism, this was maybe the number one false teaching going around.

You know, I mean, you've got the pagan church, but they don't pretend or the pagan people. They don't pretend to be Christians.

These Gnostics, to some degree, claim to be Christians. Oh, and I do have

I do have a quiz over here for me.

OK, number one, Gnosticism is you have to let me read them.

It's like it's like a TV show that we watch sometimes. If you answer the question before the question is read, you're disqualified.

So number one, Gnosticism is a an alternative view of Christianity, be a thick kind of pasta.

I knew that would get a woohoo. OK, or see a melding of Christianity and Greek philosophy.

I mean, some people will say, how many want to say, hey, nobody wants to say,

OK, because there are a lot of scholars who would say, hey. Why do you suppose there are scholars who would want to say, hey,

I'm sorry, Larry. They have a low view of scripture. Ding, ding, ding, ding. That's about a thousand dollar answer right there.

You can see the clerk afterwards. But the correct answer is C. It's a melding, you know, a joining together of Christianity and pagan philosophy,

Greek philosophy. You know, the fancy schmancy term for it is platonic dualism.

And we'll develop that a little bit more. But it's this idea of the spiritual world being good and the physical world being bad.

So the answer to number one, for those of you keeping score is C. And that's where we get, you know, ultimately syncretism.

It's this idea of blending. So we're going to blend together the Greek worldview along with Christianity.

And we wind up with Gnosticism. OK, number two, true or false.

There seems to be a difference between the God of the New Testament and the Old Testament.

It's kind of a tricky way of phrasing it. Who wrote this thing anyway? There seems to be a difference between the

God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. True or false? Well, doesn't it seem like there is?

See, that's you've got to think about it a little bit more. True or false? Pastor Bob says that's the complaint of the current.

What did you say? Spear throwing atheists.

OK. Javelin throwing. Yes. OK. I mean, that is right, because the

God of the Old Testament is what? Sure he is.

Come on. He just Sodom and Gomorrah. He just sees him and he just like lets him have it. And what about the whole flood thing and all that stuff, all the judgment wrath?

Is there any difference between the God of the Old Testament, the New Testament? Atheists, unbelievers look at it or even some professing believers look at it and say, the

God of the New Testament is much nicer. There's a problem with that. What are some of the problems with it?

Actually, there are several problems with it. But what are some problems with it? Corey, Book of Revelation.

There's a lot of judgment in there, a lot of fury, a lot of people dying. Right. John.

Yeah, I know. I'm just calling on you anyway. OK. God doesn't change.

If and you know, here's it. Here's the thing. And everybody should just write this down.

What John just said. God doesn't change. And everyone has a problem if he does.

Why? Why do we all have a problem if God changes? What's he going to do next?

We don't know. Right. He could be unjust tomorrow. He could be a lot of different things.

If God changes, you know, we don't have a God of the Bible anymore. We've got a God of the

Koran, one who's capricious, one who changes mind, one who could be loving and kind today and then say, you know what, enough of that.

We've got essentially a Greek God, you know, one who's a lot like us. And if there's one thing we don't want, it's a

God like us. I tell people all the time

I'm not God and we all should be thankful I'm not. Right. Yeah.

Good point. It's assumed that the object of the Old Testament God's wrath didn't deserve it, which was false.

They absolutely did deserve it. You know, there are other things in the New Testament that would indicate to us that there's a problem with that.

One would be, of course, Ananias and Sapphira. They get judged pretty swiftly and pretty catastrophically for lying to the

Holy Spirit. Here's another problem. I mean, even as we're reading through the book of Hebrews, what do we find out?

We found out that a lot of those Old Testament saints who really weren't very faithful, and yet God saves them anyway by faith.

Right. I mean, I just love to go back to the story of Samson, because you study, you know, if you go home and read

Judges 13 through 16, it's a challenge to figure out where Samson gets saved. It's a real challenge.

Like it's a cliffhanger. In fact,

I think that'd be a good title for this sermon. You know, it's a it's a cliffhanger because when does he get saved?

Does he get saved? We know he gets saved, but only because the Bible tells us so. Otherwise, we just think no way.

OK, so number two, there seems to be a difference between the God of the New Testament. The Old Testament is false.

Ultimately, you know, that word seems whoever wrote it should be fired. Number three, the idea that God could become flesh is a incongruent.

I've always just wanted to say that in Sunday school. So there it is. Incongruence with a neoplatonic worldview.

Thank you. Of course, really should be neoplatonic because we're talking about kind of more platonic.

But I but I digress. Incongruent with a neoplatonic worldview. B, historical

Christianity, C, patent folly or D, both A and B.

I think the correct answer is D. You know, I like that because it is congruent, incongruent with a neoplatonic worldview, which means what?

Everybody's like, I have no idea. Right.

They don't like this whole idea of the spiritual and the physical being together because the spiritual is good.

The physical is inherently evil. And so if you put those two together, it's like, you know, can you can you mix fire and ice?

Can you you know, there are a lot of things that just don't go together and that's what they would think. And so it doesn't it doesn't go together.

It's incongruent. It doesn't jive with the whole idea of the Platonist worldview.

But it's also historical Christianity, right? This is this is what happened. Jesus became flesh.

He took on flesh for us. Questions, thoughts, confusion.

OK, Corey, you're getting ahead of us. I like dealing, you know,

I was talking on Facebook with yesterday. Who's in? I don't know what to call him. You know, I guess

I could call him a wannabe Gnostic.

But these kind of urbanites, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

I mean, Bart Ehrman, who's down in North Carolina, believe University of North Carolina, used to be an evangelical scholar.

And so now that he is a. Neoplatonic Gnostic scholar, you know, people are he wrote.

And I have it in my notes, so I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. We'll get to him later. Number four, is it

Christianity or Gnosticism? Which insists on a class of people who are saved no matter what they do from birth to death.

OK, here's our first really opportunity to be a Gnostic. Gary, boy, howdy.

That's a good answer. It's Gnosticism. Why isn't that Christianity? OK, it doesn't depend on them.

Right. It's not up to the man who runs or the man who wills. But I'm. God, who has mercy.

Right. Now, what Romans 10. Sorry. Nine says. It's not up to us, but we do have to exercise faith.

And how do we exercise faith? Because God gives it to us.

I mean, anybody who exercises faith on their own. It's got a little island of righteousness that we need.

We need to investigate. So here's the thing about Gnosticism, though.

Gnosticism has this idea. And I mean, I better go to my. Notes here for a moment.

Listen to this. Three kinds of people in Gnosticism, not the elect.

You know, the non elect and the whatever. Anti elect.

There are the material people and these people cannot be saved.

They're so vile. They cannot be saved. Then there is a classification of people they call the animal, a mix of material and spiritual.

They have to do good works to be saved. This is the church. This is what they say.

This is what people are here to do to get saved. They have to work, work, work, work.

And then there are the spiritual. These are saved by their very nature. They can do whatever they want.

And they're going to be saved. Now, what's interesting about these people is.

Well, again, I'm remembering now it is a quiz question, so I don't want to get.

I don't want to ruin my own quiz. OK. Number five, is it

Christianity or Gnosticism, which most closely resembles the ancient mythologies of Rome and Greece?

OK, Gnosticism, unless you're Roman Catholic, in which case

I think you can. You can make the argument that, you know, it's Christian. Why do I say that?

I think there's there's a certain element in which Roman Catholicism talking about syncretism.

What I mean, where do you think the prayers to the saints came from? I mean,

I think what they did was consistent with what they do now. Right. They took the deities and they said, well, you know, can't have people praying to all these strange, you know, the god of speed or the god of war or the god of love or the god of.

But what if they were praying to saints? That'd be

OK. You know. Yeah. The patrons patron saint of love of, you know, that's a big difference between praying to that and praying to the god of whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it ultimately doesn't matter if that was by design or somehow, you know, they just kind of stumbled upon it.

It winds up being almost a form of polytheism. Right. So it's just absorbing the culture and putting it into your religious system.

OK. Number six, biblically speaking, spiritual warfare refers to the behind the scenes battles of angels and demons, which we influence by our prayers and or our sin and or our sin be the relationships among the eons, the pleroma and the demi urge or see truth and error.

Pastor Bob's trying to go Gnostic on us. OK. Right. If you're feeling a little demi urge, we have something to clear that right up.

Nobody's going for number one or a. It's the longest answer. A lot of times the longest answers are true.

What is what is a. Did you say karate,

John? Oh, very nicely done. Yes. Frank Peretti.

You know, how many of you have pretty book one and pretty book two in the back of your Bibles? Come on.

Tell the truth. Shame the devil. OK, there we go. Yeah.

You wrote a couple of books and they were, you know, true confessions. They were one of the first books I read. I mean, they were they were kind of interesting fiction, but they really aren't what the but what does the

Bible say about spiritual warfare? What is it? I mean, obviously, see is the correct answer. How do we know that?

I mean, is there anything that says spiritual warfare is what's that process of elimination?

Which I think is somewhere in Revelations book two. OK, in Ephesians, right.

Spiritual warfare there. Right. And what's it all about in there? It's to protect us against.

Yeah. Which are. Well, let what are some of the wiles of the devil?

And, you know, here let let me just shortcut it here and we'll just go to. Second Corinthians, Ephesians six gives us a good idea of what we need to do in that case.

But I think the really maybe the best description is Second Corinthians, chapter 10, verses three to five, for though we walk in the flesh.

And by the way, when he says that, he's not talking about we walk in sin. He's talking about we walk in, you know, the physical world.

We are not waging war according to the flesh. In other words, this isn't a physical war that we're engaged in as Christians.

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

And listen, if you want to know what strongholds are. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey

Christ. So here's the idea. The idea is that Satan and demons aren't, you know, trying to bring darkness into the world, except in this sense, they're bringing spiritual darkness.

That is to say, false religions, false religious systems. And how do we combat those?

By knowing the truth and by proclaiming the truth, right? People want to tell us all kinds of insights they have, or even that they know things are true because they've had an experience.

And again, I was just dealing with a man who's homosexual here a few days ago and is convinced that he's become a

Christian because of an experience he had, but wants to deny the Bible.

Well, those two things don't go together. You know, so what do we do? We apply the truth of Scripture. And if they reject that, well, then they reject it.

Thoughts or questions? Spiritual warfare? Yeah, I mean, the whole idea, and let me just be clear.

You know, if somebody says, you know, a Christian says, I don't have a problem with homosexuals.

Okay, I would say this. I don't have any problem with homosexuals that I don't have with self -identifying fornicators or bank robbers or, you know,

I have a problem with all those things. Why? Because the truth says, the

Bible says, those things are sins, right? And if your lifestyle is such that you can be marked out as, you know, one of these sins because this is just what you do, then there's a problem.

And the problem is you're outside the kingdom of God. You know, you need to believe and repent.

So, yeah, that's the problem. I mean, I'm no more interested. And that's part of what we talked about last week is this idea, you know, we don't want to get in the habit of telling people to reform their life, right?

If they come to Christ, Jesus will reform their life. And I think of my friend

Han, you know, who at one point, he would describe himself in college as a communist, right?

He gets out of college, goes to law school, and that's when life really took a bad turn for him because he was a communist, and then he became a lawyer.

Sorry. Sorry. Couldn't resist. You know, and he just went on his merry way, living his life, and then, you know, the

Lord saves him in his mid -30s, and guess what? Nobody had to tell him to stop committing the sins he was committing.

Why? And I'm not saying, by the way, being a lawyer is a sin. It's close, but it's not.

But what happens is, as the Holy Spirit takes resonance in you, and you start, you know, reading the

Word and renewing your mind by the reading of God's Word, your life changes.

Not because you want to reform it so people will think more highly of you, but because out of gratitude for what the

Lord has done for you in saving you from your sins, you change.

You know, you just think, well, I can't live that way anymore. I get no joy out of that. It's like I said a couple

Sunday nights ago. You know, you realize that the world that you're living in, this sinful world, is not your home.

You don't like sin anymore. You want to be free from it, and that's, you know, the difference between living a life of death and a life of life.

So, okay. Number seven, true or false,

Gnosticism means secret knowledge. Close enough for government work.

I mean, Gnosticism is from the Greek word which means? Right.

To know knowledge, yep. So this idea of, you know, hidden knowledge or secret knowledge, if you're a

Gnostic, you know things that other people don't. So, true.

Number eight, true or false, Docetism is the teaching of the doctrine that things made of spirit is good because my grammar is not.

Thank you. Things of the spirit are good, but everything fleshly, earthly, or material is intrinsically evil or bad.

That is true. You know, again, kind of a synonym, basically the same sort of thing as, you know,

Docetism, this dualistic worldview. Very similar to Gnosticism or another name for it.

Number nine, true or false, the early Christian church was chaotic and filled with all manner of opposing beliefs.

Okay. And Jude jumped on that case and all the, Peter jumped on it.

I mean, they had a whole bunch of people. It was like the FBI of the early church. Yeah, I mean, some people infiltrated the church.

That's right. That's true. But I mean, if I, let's put it this way. If I say that not everybody who will be here today is a

Christian, does that mean that there, you know, am I talking about there are different belief systems here today?

I don't think the answer is true, but here's the thing. Here's kind of the worldview that says this.

The early church was chaotic, filled with all manner of opposing beliefs because what they want you to believe is the early church had

Christians and it had Gnostics. And they would meet together and they would, you know, worship the

Lord together. And then one day the Christians got really kind of, and decided those

Gnostics had to go, right? And they then started persecuting and throwing out those

Gnostics because the Christians ultimately were not very nice people. That's the idea.

Not true, of course, but, you know, that's the basic premise.

And that's the idea behind things like lost Christianities, which we'll talk about here in a second.

Number 10, true or false, history is written by the winners and this has implications for the

Bible. So what do you do with that?

The first part of the statement is history is written by the winners. True, right?

Because who cares what the losers think, right? Yeah, the losers are usually dead or they're in prison or whatever.

I mean, like, would we call George Washington the father of our country if they'd lost the revolution?

No. We call him the biggest traitor in American history or British history. God save the queen.

Our flag would be a little bit different, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that first part is true.

History is written by the winners. Here's the tricky part. Christina knows this.

And that's a conjunction, right? Thank you. Conjunction, conjunction, what's your function?

In this case, the function is to tie the first statement with the second statement. They both have to be true for the whole statement to be true.

If any part of it is false, then the whole statement is false. History is written by the winners.

True. And this has implications for the Bible. Why not? How can you say that unless you don't believe the

Bible is a book of history? Why isn't it true?

Okay, the Bible isn't only a book of history, although it is a historical book.

It is God's word. The Bible isn't written by man.

So here's the thing. You have people like Bart Ehrman.

Here's a description here from Amazon .com, always a reliable source. No, because this is the description of the book,

Lost Christianities. Now, what does that title even imply? Here's my book, Lost Christianities.

What does that imply? Well, that he has secret knowledge, yeah.

He understands the real truth that there were

Christianities, plural. There is no one truth of Christianity, right?

And some of those truths were lost.

Let's say a prayer. Light a candle for the lost Christianities.

Yes, it is interesting, right? Because if what Bob was saying there is if that is correct, you know, the history is written by the winners.

Well, when did the Christians become the winners, right? Because they're getting lit up and, you know, run out of town and imprisoned and beheaded and fed to animals and all these kind of things are going on.

So when exactly did they become the, you know, persecuting majority? When did that happen, right?

And that wasn't going to happen for at least a couple hundred years. And even then, it really wasn't

Christianity that won. It was a political system sort of imposed, again, this whole syncretistic idea.

When you have a man who was probably, I mean, we could see him in heaven, but Constantine, was he a

Christian? I don't know, you know. But, you know, he decides he's going to make

Christianity the official religion and a lot of things happen as a result of that. But that's not until 325

AD. Okay, Bob did read the end of the book,

Pastor Bob did, and we win in the end, and that's true. We win in Christ. But anyway, let me finish this.

Lost Christianities, the early Christian church was, listen, a chaos of contending beliefs.

Now, even as I read that in the question, contending beliefs, the whole idea that a church of Christians would have contending, that is to say, opposing ideas, well, there's a problem with that.

We don't have any unity in there. Jesus prays for the unity of the church, and then we have, you know, we get together on Sunday morning and somebody says, well,

I believe in this, and somebody over there says, well, I don't, that's wrong. How can you believe that?

That's not what a church is. He goes on to say, some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one

God, but two or 12 or 30. Some believe that the world had not been created by God, but by a lesser ignorant deity.

Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human, but not divine, while others said that he was divine, but not human.

That's Bart Ehrman. That's why when somebody cites him as, you know, their authority, I'm sorry, but you're talking about, you know, what's the problem when an unbeliever looks at the

Bible and concludes that the Bible is wrong? He can't understand the

Bible. How do we know that? The Bible says that in 1 Corinthians 2, right?

It says, unless you have the Holy Spirit, you can, like, I'm certain that you can understand the grammar, that you can understand some of the implications.

But unless your mind is illumined by the Holy Spirit, you do not understand the spiritual implications of what is written,

Corey. Yeah, how does that work exactly? You know, the church is divided, right?

And it's being persecuted, and people are being dragged off for a variety, apparently, of beliefs.

How do they stay together? And, you know, it becomes like you have to be extremely gullible to buy this whole premise here.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, who's doing their persecuting and based on what?

And it's just a whole big mess, right? So the description of Amazon goes on to say, all these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims.

Books repeatedly produced by Jesus' own followers. Well, what's the problem with that?

I mean, it's like, you know, if you look at the Gnostic books, even the most liberal lunatic professor will not tell you that any of them are written by the apostles.

None of them will say that. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity.

This says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various lost scriptures, including, listen to these lost scriptures, how they're just described here in this neutral thing.

Forged gospels. Okay, I think the church is really missing out because it doesn't have forged gospels.

Forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus' closest disciple, oh, which

I guess would be John the way it's common here, and Judas Thomas, Jesus' alleged twin brother.

I mean, why would we put any value at all in these things? And he calls what we would call our brothers and sisters in Christ, he calls them proto -Orthodox

Christians. You know, they were the prototypes for the

Orthodox Christians, and I'm like, okay, whatever. And then he says that the proto -Orthodox

Christians, those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized

Christian belief, scrupulously researched and lucidly written, lost

Christianity is an eye -opening, or some might say eye -rolling, account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.

I mean, it makes me want to sing, you know, onward, Christian soldiers. You knew they were right when they said diversity,

Sharon. Yes. Yeah, candidacy.

I mean, the objective is to, you know, deconstruct Christianity, and you do that by deconstructing the

Bible. Yeah, even though we have written lists, basically, of the canon,

I think going back to about 180 or something like that. So, you know, the idea that somehow that this was a legitimate battle is just absolute rubbish.

But, yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, David. Was he? I think, you know,

I think you have to go area by area, but here's what

I would say to Athanasius later, right? But with all due respect to Corey, I don't know that it was like,

I don't know that I would compare, like, for example, evangelicalism today and, you know, against maybe the watchtower, let's say, you know, in terms of numbers.

I don't know that that sort of comparison would hold up when we're talking about fringy groups. But certainly the

Gnostics were infiltrating, as our brother said here, infiltrating the church.

And we would see that even in some of the New Testament writings where they're warning against these kind of things, right?

So, you know, how big of a movement was it? I don't know. But it was, I think, in the early, early church, probably not that significant because they didn't have the writings that they would develop.

I think the earliest Gnostic writings that I remember off the top of my head are maybe about 120, 130, you know, around that area.

And then they kind of ramp up. And the issue with that is, you know, we've got, they've already got, they've had the

Gospels and other writings in circulation for quite some time. And then these fake

Gospels and other things pop up. So, but Sharon's point was really right on the money.

You know, those people then didn't know. But now we have this kind of insight 2 ,000 years later where we can debunk, you know, deconstruct.

No, we don't. You know, this is just, again, and here was my point, and going back to 1

Corinthians 2 .14, when unbelievers go to Scripture and they're looking for a reason not to believe it, guess what?

They find it. Why? Because they go in with a presupposition that this is a book of myths put together by men, which is remarkable.

You know, we know there are at least 40 or so authors over a couple thousand years. And so the idea that these men, without the aid of computers or anything else, could somehow put together a coherent book, what a job they did.

That's really amazing. Or you can think to yourself, well, what if, just for a moment, there was a supernatural being who superintended the authorship of the entire book, who instructed, breathed into, however you want to phrase it, you know, these men so that they wrote according to their own knowledge and their own personalities what

God wanted them to write, which is more credible. And, you know, history doesn't write the

Bible. God wrote the Bible. Maybe just one more.

Any other comments or questions about that one? Okay. Yeah, the condemnations of the

Gnostics appeal to the writings of the apostles and to the authoritative writings of Scripture. And so it's kind of natural that things would go that way for us as Christians, right?

Number 11. Is that where we're at? Yeah. Number 11, true or false, the

Christians used their power to ensure the various Gnostic groups were relegated to the dustbin of history.

Again, I've always wanted to say the dustbin of history in Sunday school. So there you have it.

I'm just looking for ways to get kind of cool phrases and do, you know, what a silly idea.

Like we were saying, you know, how did they have the power to do these things? They're running for their lives.

I remember reading, and I'll have to look it up. I think I actually saw it on a history channel thing like eight, ten years ago.

But then I looked it up to see if it was true. So, you know, the Christians, when Peter writes to those who are in Asia Minor, you know, in 1

Peter, and they're scattered. Well, they're scattered because of persecution and coming persecution.

One of the places he mentioned was Cappadocia. And, you know, they went and they did these kind of, they went in and they filmed these caves in Cappadocia where the

Christians were hiding while they were persecuting the Gnostics. But they showed these caves and they talked about how they were engineered so that they almost had like kind of air conditioning because the water would, or the air would come in and go over water, you know, and they had these kind of all this, what's the word, circulation kind of stuff because caves, you know, being what they are.

And they had churches, they had worship centers and all this stuff, you know, carved out into all this stone in there. And I was like, okay, but did they have baptismal fonts?

And yes, they did. And guess what? They were dunkers. And I'm like, yes. It just goes to show, you know.

But, yeah, the idea that somehow, you know, the Christians went around crushing their objects.

Not yet. That won't happen for, you know, a long time. But, yeah, that's just a silly idea.

Anyway, any other questions or comments before we close because we're a little over time here? All right.

And we'll finish this up and keep going next week. Father, thank you. Even as we look at the amazing work that you've done, we just praise you and thank you.

And, Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ who not only delivered us from our greatest opposition, that is to say our sin, what we do, how we sin against you, paid the price for that, went willingly to the cross in our place, and then rose victoriously on the third day.

But not only did that, but preserved the truth, continues to draw people today and build his church against enormous opposition, political, religious, and in just every way, how the world scoffs at the gospel.

And he continues to build his church. We thank you for that. And we just pray that you continue to bless our day here at Bethlehem Bible Church.