Rome, Israel, and the Jesus Movement

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Speaker: Ross Macdonald Chapters 1-2 (Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power, vol. 1) Sunday Evening Study

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the New Testament, and the first two chapters really sit us in the New Testament, and so we're gonna do this as a very quick overview and summary so that we can start in two weeks right at really the beginning of the church after the time of the
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New Testament. So as we start now, again, every time we gather for the Sunday nights,
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I'm gonna have new sheets for the kids, we'll sing a hymn to our triune God, we'll recite the
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Nicene Creed at the end and sing the Gloria Patri, and then I'm gonna give an overview of the reading, just pulling out just a few little things along the way, and the really important thing with that is
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I'm gonna skip over all sorts of things. I want this to be as accessible as possible.
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I'm assuming a lot of people will not have read, and if you have read, then you already have a lot of the detail and information along the way, and if you're still dissatisfied, don't grumble or gripe, because there is an advanced group that will kick off not this coming
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Saturday, but the next Saturday, and then every in -between Tuesday all the way through October, all right?
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And so that'll be the time when you can ask all of the arcane technical questions, and we'll dig a little bit deeper, and I'll have some extra readings for us to really get our minds around the first three centuries of the church.
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I also am gonna have a word of the evening for all the kids, all right?
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Now the word of the evening tonight is Roman. Roman. So if I say the word
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Roman, you guys need to do something for me. You have to embody the
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Roman spirit. The Romans were a very proud people, and they were very mighty in their day. We're gonna be talking about that in a moment, so every time you hear that word
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Roman, you need to flex your muscles just like the Romans thought they were doing in the world, all right?
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All right, parents might have to help, and don't leave me hanging, but when we say the word
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Roman, I might even pause till we get the hang of it, you're gonna want to flex your muscles, so there'll be a word of the evening every time we get to it.
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It's very important that you hear the word Roman and not Rome, all right?
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The word of the evening is Roman, okay? So don't flex that Rome or we'll have to call you out on that, okay?
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So this is a start, and we are condensing the first two chapters because we want to get to the 100s and beyond, okay?
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And these first two chapters are getting us right to the edge of the 100s with Domitian and the
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Domitian persecutions in 96. I'm skipping over entirely the intro, the preface where Needham explains why he wrote this and how he wrote this.
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He gives a nice little overview of how we understand and date things and why it is that the birth of Christ is dated to 4
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BC now by most scholars, and again, I'm skipping over that entirely, but one thing I do want to draw from the introduction, and this is the bottom of page 15, and this is something that I really hope we'll all come to understand by the time we finish these first eight chapters in October, and Nick Needham says at the bottom of page 15,
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And I hope that will become very clear to you across this study in the first half of this book.
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As the Reformers said, the fathers are ours, and these really are our spiritual fathers, and we really do stand on their shoulders because, as we'll see, these men were giants.
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These men were giants, okay? So with that, we're going to begin on page 27 with the historical background, and here we have, as the psalm title, the two sources that are the context for the
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New Testament and the ministry of Jesus, and that is Rome and Israel.
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I don't know if that was because people were listening or weren't listening. The context, of course, of Rome and Israel really are the two sources that help explain the ministry of Jesus in the beginning of the church, and that's why
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Needham is going to address that. So, right in the middle of the page, he says, we need to consider two basic factors to this historical background.
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The Roman, all right, there we go. We got a few. Some people were sleeping.
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The Roman Empire and the history of Israel, right? The history of Israel is important, not only for the immediate context of Jesus and the apostles and the beginning of the church in Jerusalem, but it's also important because the history of Israel carries with it the covenants, the scriptures, the promises of God, all of those benefits that Paul speaks to in Romans 9, and so it's not just the immediate social context that takes place in Israel, but it's also the heritage of Israel.
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However, the environment and the sort of global pressure is really from the
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Roman Empire. Thank you. This is more of an adult exercise, I guess.
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The Roman Empire, and so notice the points that Nick Needham gives.
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He says, first, there's a common political loyalty. When you think of the history of Rome, you're thinking 753
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BC. A little rhyme. 753 BC, that's the historical date to the origins of the
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Roman Empire. Rome was ruled by kings until a few centuries later when there was an overthrow of the last
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Tarquinian king, and ever since then, Rome had become a republic up until the days of Julius Caesar.
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So the Roman Republic divided power rather than being loyal to a singular king. The power was divided between two men known as consuls who were the head of the
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Senate which ruled the people of Rome. So everywhere, in fact, if you still go to parts of the
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Empire, the former Empire today, you'll notice on street corners or in ruins or even on sewer plates in places in Italy, the initials
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SPQR, and that is the Latin for the Senate and the people of Rome.
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So you get the idea there. That is a very Republican way of understanding power. The Senate split power between the two consuls elected yearly and the people of Rome, and that Republican model falls away when you have the
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Roman, ooh, we're flagging fast, the Roman Emperor. And so Julius Caesar, now we're on page 28,
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Julius Caesar comes to the fore. Who here has heard of Julius Caesar? All right,
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I would be terrified about the state of education. Most of the adults here hadn't heard of Julius Caesar. If you've heard of Caesar's pizza, pizza pizza, you've heard of Julius Caesar.
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Julius Caesar, of course, is very famous. He was the one that ended up sort of putting himself at the forefront of Rome, and he made himself a dictator and therefore a perpetual ruler.
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You could actually, in a time of crisis, have the Senate declare someone dictatorial powers until the crisis was averted, and then the power would go back to the two consuls.
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And so Julius Caesar basically said, there's a crisis, and I'm the dictator for the job. The problem was when the crisis was averted, he didn't want to let go of those dictators' powers.
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So Nida mentions the two assassins, Brutus and Cassius. He says perhaps the most famous assassins in history.
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And the assassins called themselves, does anyone know what the assassins called themselves?
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Anyone want to take a guess? How did Brutus and Cassius think of themselves in light of the glorious Republic of Rome that would have no king?
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If ever there was a no -kings protest, it was Brutus and Cassius. Do you know how they thought of themselves?
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The liberators. That's what they called themselves, liberatores. We're gonna liberate the tyranny of Caesar by taking him out of the picture, and then we'll restore the glorious Republic.
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But by then, the Roman, oh wow, that was the worst yet,
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Empire had gotten a taste for all of the bread and circus of Caesar.
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It was kind of nice to have a king. It's not mentioned by Needham, but in fact Caesar was very good to the
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Jews in Rome. And so it's recorded by Tacitus that when Julius Caesar was having his funeral oration, the
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Jews were weeping, and it could be heard throughout the city of Rome. So Julius Caesar was very good at making friends, bringing even barbarians into the
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Senate. Really, he was a chaos agent in terms of the Roman Republic. He also was very intelligent to make his nephew his adopted son, and therefore the heir of his estate, and that would have been
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Octavian. Octavian goes by another name according to Needham. Who knows that name? Joshua.
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Very good. I remember your paper on the Roman Republic. Augustus. Now this name will come up again and again in our study tonight.
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There's several places where the name Augustus is mentioned. In fact, Augustus is mentioned right in the
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New Testament. You have at the top of 29, it was the census that was commanded by Augustus.
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In other words, he wanted to know, who's in my empire? How many people are there? And he commanded that everyone go back to the place of their birth so that their names could be recorded.
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And so when we read Luke chapter 2, Mary, pregnant with the Lord Jesus, and Joseph are traveling to Bethlehem because an emperor in Rome named
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Augustus commanded that there would be a census. So that's the political context where the
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New Testament begins. We'll get back to Augustus as we move on a little bit further into the book.
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Also, the economy. In other words, as Rome began to expand, as Augustus secured his control, and now the whole
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Mediterranean world was essentially under the thumb of Augustus, under the thumb of the
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Roman, well maybe we'll just abandon this. Am I the only one? Okay. The Roman Empire.
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Then trade now was becoming global. In fact, we know from the first century of the famous spice route, and we have
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Roman artifacts in China and Chinese artifacts in ancient Rome. There were spices that could only be found in Indian plants that are being dug up in Herculaneum in Pompeii, right?
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So this is a global economy. Why? Because there's global roads.
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And the Romans were very good at building roads and water systems. Why? Because Roman soldiers need to be able to get to the edges of the empire very quickly, and you need some good roads if you're going to do that.
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Now let's just pause here and think about an empire that controls the whole world around the
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Mediterranean Sea, effectively the only world that matters at this point in history. The Mediterranean world is the world.
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That's why Paul can say that Spain is the ends of the earth, right? In his mind, in a
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Roman way of thinking, that is the ends of the earth. Why is it important that you have all of these road systems and all of these trade networks that have brought about cultural exchange, and you have, as he'll go on to say,
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Alexander the Great giving a common language? So you have a language, you have a system, roads, cultures interchanging.
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Why is that very important providentially for the gospel? Let's think about that.
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Spread very quickly. Is it only going to spread to one culture in one location?
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Every tribe and tongue. So Augustus thinks, I'm the best thing since sliced bread, but actually
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God is using Roman might to pave the way for the gospel, to actually allow the conditions for the church and the kingdom to advance throughout the
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Roman world, right? So it's really important that we look at God's providence unfolding in the
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Roman Empire. I think even I missed a few. That'll be one of the things we revisit and rethink.
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I mentioned Alexander the Great, and at the bottom of 29 heading on to 30 and 31, he's talking about the influence of Greek culture.
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The Romans loved Greek culture. They loved imitating Greek culture. Most of the
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Mediterranean world would have spoken Greek as a result of the common dialect that came through Alexander's conquests, and so you had a shared language, a market language.
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If you were in the the upper courts closer to the first century, you would have known Latin, but you wouldn't have used it.
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Most of the letters we have, most of the writings we have are in Greek. Latin becomes more commonplace as we head into the later stages of the
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Empire, and Latin slowly begins to displace the common use of Greek, but the really important thing to understand with that is you have a common language.
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What language are the New Testament writings written in? Greek. They're essentially a passport.
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They can go at just about any harbor, any trading port, to any people. That's market language.
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That's street language. If you go and you travel to Europe today, and you come up to a vendor, that vendor, that hot dog salesman,
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I don't think they eat hot dogs in Europe, probably for good reasons, but the vendor probably knows six or seven languages.
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He knows the language languages of the tourists. Who's streaming through, he's gonna know their language, right?
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The common desire and interest in the Greek culture was another way that God was actually allowing the gospel to be able to spread in the first century.
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I'm gonna be very quick over this, but Needham talks about four forms of religion in the
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Empire, and again, he's giving a 10 ,000 foot overview. There's a lot more detail and a lot more little side notes we could make along the way.
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He does a good job avoiding those bunny trails, and I'm gonna try to follow his lead. Essentially, you have paganism, not the belief in the one true and living
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God, but the belief in a pantheon of gods, many gods, and really every force of nature, every form of human experience has its own god.
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Your family, your work, all of these would have had designated deities. If you were in a certain trade, you would have a patron deity.
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There was a god for the metalworkers and a god for the silversmiths, a god for the wine merchants, a god for the sailors, and so forth.
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So you have your token deities, you've had your family deity, maybe a particular deity that you would have worshipped and paid homage to that was the god of your family, the god of your ancestors, and the chief god overall was
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Zeus, or in the Roman term, Jupiter. And underneath Zeus, or the Romans, Jupiter is all the other gods.
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The idea is, as he says here, pagan worship involved animal sacrifices, prayer, all these ways of trying to understand the will of the gods, and that led to some very bizarre and superstitious behavior, right?
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If you serve these panoply of gods, and as we know from Acts, when Paul goes and preaches on Mars Hill, they're so superstitious about upsetting the gods that they even build an altar to the god that they don't know.
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And that's where Paul begins. He says, I'm gonna tell you about the god you don't know. I'm gonna reveal to you the god that you don't worship, and he's the only one that you should worship.
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So they're so superstitious about gods that they're involved in animal sacrifices. What does Jesus say in Matthew 6?
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These incessant prayers. They think that if they pray a lot, and a lot, and a lot, that the gods will be favorable to them.
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They also are always trying to understand the will of the gods. So we have, for example, in Corinth, where Paul planted the church at Corinth, you have the sense that there was a temple to Asclepius.
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He was a god of healing, of medicine. And if you go to that temple, you find little votive ornaments, little clay pottery of body parts, and these were given in prayer and in worship to Asclepius.
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The idea is, if your thumb hurts, you go make a little model of your thumb, and you give that to the temple of Asclepius, and you say, please,
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Asclepius, heal my thumb. So what we have are hundreds, if not thousands, of little clay body parts.
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That's the idea. Or another way you try to understand the will of the gods is you do what's called augury.
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Did you notice a bird flying at a certain time? That's a bad omen. It's not gonna be a good day. Or we have another form where you have a priest cut open perhaps a goat or a bull, and you grab out that nasty deep red liver, and the priest looks at it and tells you what the will of the gods is.
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This is the kind of superstition that belonged to pagan worship. But it wasn't only pagan worship.
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Middle of 31, there was also emperor worship. Now this is something foreign to the
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Romans. And most likely, emperor worship never would have come about if the
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Roman Empire had not become so mighty. We've really abandoned Roman Empire. But here's the sentence for it.
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The Roman Empire is mighty, east and west. Just about as far as you can go, they spread their influence.
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It's in the eastern cities, the Greek kingdoms and city -states, where the kings had been divinized and worshipped.
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And so now the Romans take over, and what do all these Greek people do? Well, they just transfer their worship of their king over to Caesar.
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We used to worship this king. He got kicked out by Caesar. I guess now we're gonna worship Caesar. You know what?
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Caesar doesn't mind it. In fact, when Caesar goes over there, when Nero goes over there, he really enjoys it.
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He kind of plays into it. Now the Senate does not like this at all. They don't like the idea of imperial worship early on.
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But before long, the emperors end up allowing divine honors to be paid to them, and now the
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Senate is minting coins in honor of the divine Caesars, and creating festivities to worship the
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Caesars. So imperial worship begins in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire. Why is this important for understanding the gospel?
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If you had some pocket change, in fact, you kids on your sheet, you have some money there on the sheet.
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That's a Roman coin. There's all sorts of little writings around that Roman coin.
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Can I borrow that sheet, Emily, real quick? You have a Roman coin like this. Here's the head of Nero, and you have this writing, this imprint around his head.
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And this is Titus Caesar. Now you have these abbreviations. Imperator, which would be emperor.
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Augustus. Filius, so that's the son of Augustus. Augustus had been divinized.
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This coin doesn't have it, but most coins would have DF. Divus Filius, son of the divine emperor.
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And so if you had Roman pocket money, if you were buying bubblegum at your local variety store in the first century, thank you,
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Seth, you would have in your pocket a coin that said,
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Caesar is God's son. Nita mentioned that Augustus had inscriptions throughout his empire.
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Because he finally put the civil wars to rest, he was the savior of the world. And so you have inscriptions, if you're walking through the forum, if you're walking through places where inscriptions, carvings into stone were offered, you would be walking past things that said things like,
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Augustus, the son of God, the savior of the world. Now what does that sound like? Sounds a lot like what the early
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Christians were preaching. Jesus is the son of God, and he alone is the savior of the world. We know of inscriptions from Augustus that say,
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Augustus, who has brought the good news of peace. Now what's that word, good news?
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Does anyone want to take a guess? What's that word, good news, do you think? Gospel. Same word in Greek.
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Greek inscriptions, Augustus, the one who has brought the gospel of peace. So you start to understand there is this dimension in which
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Christianity is a rival to the claims of the emperor. The gospel of Jesus Christ is undermining and at odds with the gospel of Caesar, if we could put it that way.
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So you have imperial worship, and as we're going to read at the very end tonight, we're going to read from Tacitus, Nero, the emperors, do not like when
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Jesus Christ is worshipped. And they don't like these abominable Christians who won't go with the flow and pay homage to Caesar.
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We have the mystery cults. I'm going to pass over this. This was a fascination. Once you begin with superstition, there really is no end.
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And you see that where Romans loved to have foreign gods. They loved to worship the gods of the Egyptians.
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When new territories were conquered, new gods entered into the pantheon, and mystery cults developed around the worship of those gods.
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So the Romans loved adding gods to their worship. Then along come the
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Christians, and the Christians say, no, no, this God, the only God, cannot be worshipped alongside other gods.
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He's an all -or -nothing kind of God. In fact, we refuse to worship any God but Him. That was a big no -no to the
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Roman mind. He also mentions philosophy, and this will become important later, so I'm going to largely pass over this now, but it's important you understand that there was a lot of philosophical underpinnings at the time that Christianity came onto the scene.
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Those who were literary, those who were writing treatises and books were of different schools.
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There was always some overlap, some things that Needham doesn't get into, but generally you have three schools of philosophy, and the upper classes, the literary classes, would have been those very familiar with the great literature and great philosophy, and the great, you know, ethicists and speakers of the day.
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They were very interested and intrigued by these kinds of things, and so the major movements here are, of course,
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Platonism. If you've ever seen the very famous painting by Raphael, The School of Athens, you have at the very center of it
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Plato and Aristotle, and Aristotle is sort of pointing inward and downward to the sort of real, the immediate, and Plato very famously is pointing upward to the ideal, to the transcendent, and that's the idea of Platonism.
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It's dealing with the beyond. Now here Needham is talking about Platonism developing toward Middle Platonism by the time of the
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New Testament, and the important thing here on 34, and this will tie in to where we're going at the end of this study in the
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Nicene Controversy, Needham, I think, does a good job of summarizing two sticking points for the influence of Plato.
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Now, you kids should be listening to this because this is one of those pop quiz questions, but the greatest philosopher in terms of his influence and impact in Western history is
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Plato, okay? And some make the argument too far that early
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Christian fathers were dependent upon Platonism. Some say, for example, that Augustine was essentially applying
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Platonic thought to his theology, and I was at a seminar in November with a professor who was frothing at the mouth at that suggestion, that Augustine was captive to Plato, but a lot of early church theology was struggling with some of the implications of Plato's philosophy, and Needham gives two of perhaps the biggest influences.
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So this is from 34, midway through the first full paragraph. Platonism's extreme emphasis on the sheer gulf between the changing realm of time and the eternal unchanging
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God, right? This is really important. Middle Platonism is very interested in becoming the process of change toward the ideal, and for early
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Christian theologians, understanding God as the unchanging God, the divine
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God who is outside of time, became a sticking point. So Needham says, this made it difficult for some
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Christian thinkers to understand how an unchanging God could have entered the world of time by becoming a man in Jesus Christ.
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To solve the problem, they were tempted to say that Christ was something less than absolutely divine. How could an unchanging eternal
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God become subject to time, subject, as it were, to the succession and the changes of time?
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And so this led, in part, to denying the fact that Jesus is eternally begotten of the
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Father. And this is what will become the Arian controversy, in part, which we'll get to by chapter 8.
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The other important issue that came out of Platonic thought is this division between the soul and the body.
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So Needham says, Platonism's teaching on the superiority of the soul. Here's something pure.
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Here's something that will actually lead to that which is immortal, that which is ideal, rather than the body which decays and is subject to decay.
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And so the physical life held this powerful attraction for many, many Christians. This idea of having the purity of the soul over against the evil of matter.
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You can understand why this is such an important issue, and as Needham says, this leads to Gnosticism.
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The idea that the body is dispensable, that this flesh and world reality is something actually beneath God's intention and ideal for mankind.
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Two other schools of thought that he mentions very quickly, Epicureanism. Epicurus, of course, in ways that line up with Matthew 6, were very, almost like modern -day
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Buddhism, very concerned to overcome the throes of anxiety and fear. And Epicureanism was a philosophy that actually sought to deal with human anxiety and overcome all of the things that cause us to be less than happy and tranquil.
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And then Stoicism. This was very important for several leading Roman figures. He mentions
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Cato the Younger, Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoicist, mentions Seneca, an
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Epictetus. Seneca, a tremendous writer, in fact, it was John Calvin who published his first book as a commentary on Seneca.
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Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, and John Calvin devoted himself to studying his treatise on mercy,
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De Clementia. So that was Calvin's first published work. We should understand that the Reformers and even the
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Puritans were well acquainted with these writers, these philosophers, as even the early
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Christians were. So we shouldn't think that somehow this is a big waste of time. Why is
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Needham introducing all these figures and so on? The church was always grappling and interacting with, objecting, answering, clarifying, and elaborating these men, these worldviews, these philosophies.
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The Jewish background. Getting back into history now, he mentions
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Pompey. Pompey, I don't, this is not where we get the word pompous, but we might as well.
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Pompey styled himself Pompey Manus, Pompey the Great. Isn't it great when you can name yourself something like that?
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Pompey the Great. And he actually had a little red cape, and he tried to present himself as Alexander the
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Great. That was the hero of his life. Like some boys are obsessed with, you know, Iron Man or Batman or something.
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The hero, the superhero for Pompey was Alexander the Great, and he wanted to be a great conqueror like Alexander the
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Great. And he conquered much of the Middle East in 63 BC, and that included entering into Jerusalem.
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And what Rome loved to do was conquer, gain control of resources, and set up a subject kingdom, a vassal kingdom.
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You pay tribute to us, and we'll give you military aid when it suits us. In fact, we might just conquer you all over again.
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It's really, you know, we have the muscle to flex. We'll do what we want. But now we're getting close to the
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New Testament again. It was a result of civil wars and revolts that broke out in Judea that brought
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Rome again to install a new dynasty that had control over the Jews.
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And here we read of Augustus again. So Luke 2, Augustus is the one who, because of his command, we have
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Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. Would Augustus have ever even known of any of the promises or hopes of Israel contained in that?
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Likely not. Did he think that anything could overthrow that kind of dominion and supremacy in the world?
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No. If you read Virgil's Aenid, which Needham mentions, you know, this was the, you know, this was the maximal event of history, right?
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Augustus is the guy. And yet it's in this little tiny town of Bethlehem that the true king, the true ruler of the universe, the true bearer of the gospel of peace, the true
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Son of God, was being born into time, into space as the fulfillment of all that God had promised.
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Augustus puts to power Herod, Herod and Tipiter. The Herods, what a confusing family tree.
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There's several Herods. But here Herod and Tipiter is enthroned on Jerusalem, and this is the
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Herod in Matthew chapter 2 that tries to kill all the little boys. He wants to wipe out the potential of someone who's going to come for his throne.
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Now, what does that tell you? Let's just pause and think about this. What does that tell you about the prophecies of the
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Messiah as far as the Jews understood? Why, in other words, why would Herod try to kill the infant who was prophesied to be the
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Messiah? Why would Herod try to kill him? He believed the prophecy.
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All right, elaborate a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Here's a king whose kingdom knows no end.
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What does that mean for my kingdom? I can't let that happen. So notice that both here with Herod in the
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New Testament, just like we talked about the divine Caesar, the Son of God, the bearer of peace, where the gospel emerges, it emerges against principalities and powers.
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It emerges against the the evil empire. That sounds a lot like Babel. That sounds a lot like Exodus.
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That sounds a lot like the unfolding storyline of Scripture. God showing himself to be the ruler and keeper of his people despite the evil aims of the tyrants and, as it were, the the demagogues under satanic possession.
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Another thing to point out about the prophecies of Jesus as it pertains to Herod, we essentially have this idea that the
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Messiah is going to come and he's going to overthrow all other kings in his power, and how does that play out with the disciples?
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So it's not just Herod who believes these prophecies, what are some of the disciples think? Right. Yeah, it's the original
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MIGA movement, make Israel great again. Get the red hats, our rulers come, bye -bye
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Romans. And Jesus is like, no, not quite. Not quite. My kingdom is a little bit different than the kingdoms of this world.
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My kingdom is not just one that sits comfortably alongside the kings of this world.
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My kingdom is a kingdom that will increase and expand unto everlasting, and it's not by resisting flesh and blood so much as conquering by sword and spirit, the sword of the
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Spirit. So we come back to Augustus, and the last time I'm going to mention Augustus tonight is at the very bottom of 36.
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This is important for a few different reasons. It's Augustus who had now placed Judea under direct
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Roman control, and he installs a procurator, which is a certain form of a governor, and he installs, for a short stint,
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Pontius Pilate. Now we're going to be reciting at the end of tonight the Nicene Creed, and guess who makes an appearance in the
33:58
Nicene Creed? Pontius Pilate. Again, our faith is a historical faith.
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The architects, the men who labored over Scripture to create that creed, they understood what they were doing when they put in that name,
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Pontius Pilate. This is not some abstract fortune cookie philosophy. Our faith is rooted in history.
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It's as earthy as marble inscriptions and papyri documents and carved symbols like the anchor on some of the kids' worksheets.
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Another thing kids should pay attention to, if they would unscramble the words, they're going to want to have listening ears right now.
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Moms and dads, actually, I was looking at them like, man, those word scrambles are tough. Sorry about that, kiddos.
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I didn't want to discourage anyone. But if you pay attention, I can at least give you a big hint about what we're looking at for some of those words on the scramble.
34:55
Looking at Israel, we of course have several groups or parties that make up Jewish society in a very significant way.
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So the first is we have the Sadducees. If you're a word scrambler, you're going to want to remember that, the
35:09
Sadducees. The Sadducees were elite
35:15
Jews. They tended to be a minority, but they were a very powerful minority. The Pharisees far outnumbered them, and yet they retained control over the temple, over the sort of social dynamics at play.
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They were the elite at the time, largely speaking. The Sadducees were in cahoots, as it were, with the
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Romans, and they of course denied Scripture beyond the first five books, what we call the
35:42
Pentateuch. So they had a very limited understanding of Scripture, which meant they rejected a lot of the prophecies that come after Genesis.
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They were Sadducees because they didn't believe the prophecies. You have to be sad, you see, if you don't believe the prophecies.
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No, I've heard that one. We got to have the dad jokes, and yeah. The Sadducees also rejected the idea of a bodily resurrection.
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This, of course, is something that Paul uses to his advantage when he says, I'm a Pharisee, and it's because I'm a
36:15
Pharisee that I'm being persecuted. So the court system, the imperial alliances, these were largely borne out by the
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Sadducees. Paul knew that, and he used that to his advantage. And that brings us to the Pharisees. Again, didn't have direct elite power in the same ways as the
36:30
Sadducees, but were largely the majority. Most of the Sanhedrin, of course, was influenced by the
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Pharisees. And we read in Acts that many Pharisees came to believe in Jesus Christ. So the scribes and the
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Pharisees largely formed those who were persecuting and mocking Jesus in His ministry, but many
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Pharisees come to faith, including the most famous Pharisee that come to faith, Paul. Paul the
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Apostle. Then you have the Zealots. Of course, as Needham points out,
36:59
Simon was a Zealot. So Jesus has, you know, the red hat miga among His twelve.
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The Zealots, as we'll go on to say with the Jewish War, largely helped this uprising that led to the
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Jewish revolt in 66 that culminated with the temple being destroyed in A .D. 70.
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And then the last group that's mentioned here. So again, word scramblers. You want to think Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots, and the
37:26
Essenes. The Essenes, we have only fragmentary information about them, but this was the community at Qumran.
37:35
Who here has heard the Dead Sea Scrolls? Heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Okay, good. That's good.
37:41
1947. The really interesting thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that for much of critical scholarship through the late 1700s, 1800s, and most of the 1900s up until the 1940s, critical scholarship had the idea that what we what we know to be the
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Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures, all we have are late copies, medieval copies.
38:07
And so it's impossible to think that most of these documents go all the way back to antiquity, that these would even predate the first century.
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These are largely texts that have been developed much later. And so if you had been a
38:21
Bible scholar or a professor, you would have been cowed with that opinion, with that research, and for several centuries this was the prevailing view.
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And then in 1947, if you held that view, you were a clown, right? It's the difference a discovery makes.
38:39
A Bedouin shepherd boy throws a rock into a cave, and here come out all these documents that actually go back to the centuries
38:47
BC as well as some early AD, and they're still being discovered today. There's still caves that have documents to bequeath.
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They're very difficult to access, and so there's still active excavations going on. But you have the Dead Sea Scrolls, and these were copies of Scripture, community documents, applications of Scripture for the community at Qumran, and these were the
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Essenes. They denied the temple and the priesthood as legitimate. And so basically it was a separationist movement among the
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Jews at Qumran, along the Dead Sea. And it was the conditions of the Dead Sea, it was the salt in the air that preserved a lot of these documents in their jars.
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Otherwise they would have been lost. Again, notice the providence of God. And let me just say, you know, along those lines as Christians, we may be the fools for our faith for centuries, and it just takes a shepherd boy throwing a rock to make everyone else look like the fool, right?
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You know, Scripture is an anvil, as Spurgeon said, that has broken many hammers. So don't be concerned with impressing the critical opinions of the day.
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God knows how to preserve His Word and preserve the testimony of His Word. So that's the the four major movements, and I'm going to be very quick now.
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I'm going to skip these readings. We'll look at some of those and more on the advanced group in other chapters.
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And we're going to very quickly, in about 10 minutes, because I want to give some time for some discussion and question and answer, about 10 minutes we're just going to go through the
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Jesus Movement. This is a shorter chapter, and he's largely dealing with the events of Acts. Notice how he calls this chapter the
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Jesus Movement. We don't think about this. When I hear the phrase
40:34
Jesus Movement, I think of the 1970s, which is sometimes known as the Jesus Movement, and most of the church ladies at First Baptist Church that raised me in Sunday school were part of that Jesus Movement in the 1970s.
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They were hippies that thought Jesus was groovy, and they were going to give their lives to Him. The original
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Jesus Movement is really found on the pages of Acts, and of course it all begins at Pentecost.
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So you children should know the birthday of the Jesus Movement, the birthday of the church, is
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Pentecost. That's when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles and all those gathered in Jerusalem at Solomon's portico, and from that moment on, people are converted by hearing the gospel, and they repent and believe on Jesus Christ, and they are baptized.
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Please notice that order. They repent and believe and are baptized. Notice what he says at the bottom of 47.
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In the thought and preaching of the early church, the resurrection was seen as God's mighty vindication of Jesus' claims.
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We've talked about this in times past on Sundays. We tend, as good Protestants, we tend to make the centerpiece of our worship and faith the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
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There's nothing wrong with that. That is certainly the right center of our faith, and early Christians used the cross as a symbol, and often in their writings they would do a little
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Christogram. They would make a little cross figure when they wrote the name Christ or Christos, and so it's really important that we understand the cross is very much central to our faith and worship, but the early
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Christians didn't leave it at the cross. To leave it at the cross is almost to leave Jesus in the tomb.
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The whole point of the cross is the empty tomb. The whole point of the crucifixion is the resurrection and the ascension, and so I can't emphasize that point enough.
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The fuel and motivation of early Christian hope and practice and even courage was the fact that Jesus had risen from the grave and was returning again.
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We're going to see that at the end of the Nicene Creed, even as we recite that. You'll notice that they do, of course, describe the crucifixion, but they do it simply as He suffered under Pontius Pilate.
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The whole direction and flow of the Nicene Creed moves toward the hope of the resurrection and life to come.
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So I say this again to us as Christians. If we go back to the cross, praise God, that's wonderful, but don't stay at the cross.
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Follow it through to the resurrection. That was the anchor of the early
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Christians. We have this hope, and you kids, I have on your worksheet a little anchor to copy.
43:25
Last year several of us were in the catacombs of Calixtus. It was a very famous anchor, and if you know, an anchor has these two little hooks, the bells of the anchor, and they look like little hooks, and on one of the tombs, a very famous carving of an anchor with two little fish caught, as it were, on these hooks, and actually that's where the word anchor comes from.
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It's from anchira, which can mean a hook or a curved object, and so it was the idea here was we have this hope as an anchor, the anchor of our faith, the hope of a resurrection to come, and we're like little fish that have been caught.
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Jesus said, I'll make you fishers of men, and so little fish that were caught by the gospel, and now they're caught to this hope of the resurrection.
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That's the idea there in the catacombs, and let me tell you, you go down into these musty, cold, dark, and dank catacombs, and you're looking at what is essentially a carved out bunk bed where 1 ,800 years ago, an ancient brother or sister was laid to rest in the hope of the resurrection.
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It's a pretty stirring sight to see. They've been waiting for 1 ,800 years plus for that hope to be realized, and all of us in the room, if we're believers in Christ, we too will be laid to rest with that hope as an anchor.
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I'm gonna skip over the significance of Acts 6, but that is very significant. I'll just say by way of passing that you have the kernel of division between the
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Hebrew stream at the very beginning of the birth of the church and the Hellenist stream, and that's contained in that scuffle between the
45:09
Hebrews and the Hellenists in Acts chapter 6. That leads to seven Hellenists, in other words, seven men with Greek names to be appointed as deacons to serve and to put this squabble to rest, and that leads to one of these men,
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Stephen, being singled out because he was mighty in the Scriptures and filled with the Spirit of God, and that leads to the first persecution of the church done by the
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Jews in Jerusalem who rejected Jesus as the Messiah, rejected the message of repentance and faith and the hope of the life to come.
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And so we have the first persecution of the church, and what does that lead to at the top of 51? It leads to the scattering of the
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Hellenist Christians. So you notice you still have largely the Hebrew or the primarily
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Jewish non -diaspora, in other words, those who had not come from the far -flung regions of the Empire but had remained in Jerusalem.
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You have the scattering of the Christians throughout the world. We're gonna see this again and again every time we work through a chapter, that persecution leads to scattering and scattering leads to gospel advance.
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Persecution leads to scattering, scattering leads to gospel advance. And so you have the scattering of these believers.
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In Acts 10 we have the first Gentile convert, and as a result of that now we lead—kids should be listening for the pomp quiz—we're led in the narrative of Acts to the first Gentile church that foments the first Gentile mission, a mission to Gentiles with the gospel of peace.
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And so that church is in Antioch, the church at Antioch, an incredible church, a very important church in terms of the narrative of Acts.
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Also, and this is another pop quiz question, it's the church at Antioch where Christians are first called
47:02
Christians. It's most likely that the Christians didn't come up with that for themselves, but they were called that by others and they just owned it.
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That's usually how little names come to be, like Fauvists or Impressionists among artist circles.
47:18
It's used as an insult and they just sort of own it. Calvinist. That was meant as an insult and then we're like, yeah, if it fits, we'll wear it.
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And so you're Christians, you're followers of Christ, perhaps as a slur or an insult. Puritan.
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Yeah, history is replete with examples like this. So the last thing we'll come to is the, well actually two quick things.
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The first is the persecution of Nero. We heard of Caesar. Who here has heard of Nero?
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Nero is right up there with Julius Caesar. Nero is not on the image for, you know, the pizza boxes for good reason.
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One of my favorite coffee places, Caleb, you can vouch on this, Cafe Nero. And I know it caused some consternation among some of us.
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What are you supporting when you go to Cafe Nero? Well, not this emperor. The odd thing about Nero is that he came to power when he was a boy.
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Who here is around the age of 13? 12, 13. David, how would you like to be emperor of the world empire?
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You were about Nero's age when he came to power. That's a big job, isn't it?
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That's a big job. The good news is you would have Seneca as one of your counselors. In fact, you had many counselors.
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And if you just got out of Seneca's way, the Empire was doing pretty well. So the first five years of your neurotic reign were known as the
48:49
Quinquennium Neuronus. It was actually the Golden Age of Rome. It was really one of the best, Tacitus goes on to say, it's really the best five years the
48:56
Roman Empire ever had, was the first five years of Nero's reign. So when we say, well,
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Paul wrote Romans 13 under the reign of Nero, we have to be thoughtful, yeah, but which part of Nero's reign?
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Because there's a big difference between the beginning and the end. Nero, very famously, was the emperor fiddling while Rome burned.
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Who here has heard that expression? Probably not true that he was fiddling while Rome burned, but you get the sense that he was pretty engrossed with himself.
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One of the problems is that a lot of our sources on Roman emperors are later sources, and there was good reason to think that they were very critical and biased in the way that they recorded and reported what had become hearsay by that time.
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But the cruelty and chaos of Nero, the sort of madman that he became, retained its legendary status even centuries later.
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This great fire destroyed most of Rome in AD 64, and I'd like someone to read this for us.
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This is the second half of page 53. Do I have a volunteer to read and I'll explain what it is? Someone want to read for us the words of Tacitus?
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Everyone's looking real quick, can I pronounce it all? It's really not too bad. All right, so let me explain real quick before Senator Tacitus here reads for us this report.
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And Tacitus is another example of someone who's writing subsequent to the event, and of course he's recounting what was commonly understood or recorded from that event.
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Now, this is after the great fire that Nero carries out not the most brutal or widespread persecution of Christians, but something so sharp, so powerful, so so heavy that it almost became the description for all later persecution.
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When you get to later persecution, like the persecutions under Domitian, those persecutions were far more widespread and far more intense.
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And yet Nero almost always is the THE persecution. In fact, even centuries later under Augustine, you getting toward the 300s, there was still a rumor in Augustine's day,
51:19
Augustine mentions it, that Christians were fearful that Nero was going to come out of, back out of the sea, and actually carry out the persecution to end
51:29
Christians again. That he was going to be the beast, and this was known as the Nero Redivivus myth. Nero revived. He had actually been mortally wounded, but he never died.
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And so you can see how in the imagination, in the memory, the collective memory of early Christians, this persecution really marked what it meant to be a
51:46
Christian in the Roman Empire. We're talking about the the late 60s AD, all right?
51:54
Dan, will you please read this report? Here's an early, one of the earliest reports we have from a
51:59
Roman about how Christians were understood, what they were thought of, like in the Roman Empire.
52:05
To end the rumors that he had started the fire, Nero accused and tortured a group who were hated for their abominations.
52:16
The sect had been named after Christ, executed by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, when
52:23
Tiberius was emperor. Their fatal superstition had been checked temporarily, but was beginning to break out again.
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Not only in Judea, but even in Rome itself, where all kinds of vile and shameful activities gather and catch on.
52:40
First, the authorities arrested those who confessed to being Christians. Then, on information obtained from them, the courts convicted hundreds more.
52:50
Not so much for starting the fire, as for their antisocial beliefs. Mockery was heaped on them and their deaths.
52:58
They were covered in the skins of wild beasts, torn to death by dogs, crucified, or set ablaze, so that when nighttime fell, they lit up everything like torches.
53:10
Nero had opened up his own gardens for this spectacle, and gave a show in the arena, where he mingled with the crowd and stood in the garb of a charioteer and a chariot.
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Consequently, although his victims were guilty and deserved to die, people began to feel compassion for them, for they realized that they were being killed not for the public good, but to gratify one man's madness.
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So you're a believer, you're one of these Christians in the late 60s, and you're out on the sidewalk in the forum, and you want to evangelize.
53:54
How are you going to introduce Christians? What is the cost of being a
54:01
Christian in the first century? How could it possibly be that the
54:07
Jesus movement would get past a persecution like this? Hey, you should really consider becoming a
54:13
Christian. Oh, that sounds interesting, is that another strange God to add to the pantheon? That's great,
54:19
I worship any God I hear about, that sounds really great. What are some of the perks? Well, you'll be mocked unto death, you'll be covered in the skin of a beast and torn apart by dogs, you might be crucified,
54:32
Nero might even make you into a living torch in your garden. That's the sales pitch, that's the sales pitch.
54:40
These are the kinds of experiences that happen under persecution, and yet as Tertullian says, as again we'll see chapter by chapter, whenever persecution like this breaks out, the church advances, and so the blood of the martyrs becomes the seat of the church.
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It is almost impossible to explain how that could be apart from the Spirit of God. You have
55:07
Christians, and notice how the Romans thought about them. They're an accused group, hated for their abominations.
55:14
What are the abominations? You don't worship the Pantheon, you don't worship Caesar, you're inviting disaster into our city, into our empire.
55:22
You're the reason there's famines, you're the reason there's warfare, you're the reason there is curse and disease and suffering.
55:29
So they're hated for their abominations, for their impiety, even for their atheism. Who are the original atheists in the first century?
55:36
Christians. Christians were called atheists because they didn't have a statue to worship, an image to worship.
55:43
They believed that God was not something called by human hands or the product of human imagination.
55:49
He was the God who revealed Himself, the God who made all things, and the God who fully and expressly revealed
55:56
Himself in the person and work of Jesus, His Son. You have this description of their fatal superstitions.
56:04
Christians were seen as superstitious. Why? They don't worship the gods. Look how superstitious they are.
56:10
They're not making clay votives of their body parts and bringing them to Asclepius. How superstitious.
56:16
They're not constantly praying. How superstitious they are. You get the sense that these
56:21
Christians are nothing like any of these other groups, nothing like any of these other religions.
56:28
There's nothing like Christianity in the ancient world, nothing even remotely close to it.
56:35
And the Christians suffer as a result of this, but they don't bend. They don't just say, let's go along to get along.
56:41
All right, they double down. They're actually willing to go through the persecutions and bear the faith and the faith increases.
56:50
And so we read here again, kids pay attention for the pop quiz. It was during the reign of Nero and likely as a part of this neurotic persecution that Paul and Peter, according to church tradition, were martyred.
57:03
Paul, a Roman citizen, would not have had to go through the shame of crucifixion, and so he, according to church tradition, was beheaded probably around that time, late 60s.
57:15
Peter, according to tradition, was not a Roman citizen, of course, so he was going to be crucified, but almost as a way of making the cruel joke.
57:23
He did not want to take the place of the Lord Jesus' crucifixion in later Christian memory, and so he said, please don't crucify me as you've crucified my
57:33
Lord, and they were happy to oblige. They crucified him upside down. Very famous paintings in the
57:39
Western canon of this. One of the most famous is Caravaggio, if you google that, Michelangelo Caravaggio of Peter being born by three men as they're beginning to turn the cross upside down, and you see him holding his head up to try to prepare himself for that suffering.
57:57
So you have the the Apostles now being martyred about 30 years after the church has been born.
58:06
Then we have the Jewish War. Nero, very famously, what an artist dies with me.
58:13
His bodyguard revolts. This is a tragic history. I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories right now about what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania.
58:20
Well, the original was with the bodyguards of the emperors. The bodyguard didn't like you.
58:25
You were in deep water. So a lot of the emperors didn't make it through their guard, the
58:30
Praetorian guard as they were known, and Nero finds that he's offended enough people, and now the bodyguard is coming after him.
58:37
He runs into hiding. His servant won't put him down, so he grabs a little gladius, a short sword.
58:43
He says, what an artist dies with me. I didn't want to be an emperor. I just wanted to be an artist, a singer, a poet, and he runs himself through with the gladius, and his cowering, drooling uncle
58:53
Claudius is then, sorry, no, Claudius is before that. Nero then, as a result of his death in 68, plunges the
59:02
Roman Empire into civil war. The next year, the year 69, is known as the year of the four emperors.
59:08
Three very quick and fast struggles for the leading generals to come into the city of Rome and claim it for themselves, and the victor in the midst of that struggle across the year 69 is
59:17
Vespasian. Vespasian becomes an emperor. His son is Titus. You'll see
59:23
Titus's head on the coin if you have one of the kids worksheets, and that coin is very significant.
59:29
Kids pay attention because that coin was minted because of what Titus had done. Titus sacked
59:35
Jerusalem. Titus's soldiers destroyed the temple just as Jesus said it would be destroyed.
59:42
You see these stones, Jesus said? Not one of them will be left on another. Now Titus had given strict commands that the temple not be destroyed.
59:51
It was an ancient wonder of the world. The soldiers had fought a long and hard four -year campaign, and frankly, in the
59:58
Roman world, if you were a soldier, you were a soldier of fortune. You were going to seize things to bring back with you.
01:00:03
You're going to take advantage of the situation, and when they found out that the temple was lined with gold on the interior, that was all they needed to hear.
01:00:11
They literally tore apart every stone to get every last bit of gold that seeped between the crevices, and so the temple was completely destroyed, as Jesus had said.
01:00:22
Never to be rebuilt again, as Jesus had said. That war was really the triumph of the zealots.
01:00:30
Another pop quiz question for you kids. It was the zealots that had their popular moving, and then as Needham goes on to say, really that's the end of the
01:00:39
Sadducees and that Jewish elitism that controlled the temple cult in Jerusalem. It's also the end of the zealots and that whole movement of Jewish patriotism, and really you have the rise of the
01:00:49
Pharisees now in a totally different direction. Now Jewish worship and practice and piety is without temple and without priesthood, and you have essentially the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism as a result of the destruction of the temple.
01:01:03
And so to conclude, and we're going to end here for questions at the bottom of 56, the ultimate effect of the
01:01:09
Jewish war was to cut Christianity off almost completely from its Jewish origins.
01:01:15
From now on, the future of the Jesus movement rested in the
01:01:20
Gentile world. Alright, so that's the overview for tonight. We've got about five, maybe ten minutes if we stretch it for some questions and answers.
01:01:31
Again, we covered a lot of ground tonight. It'll be a little briefer with more Q &A next time around, but any quick questions or clarifications or comments before we recite the
01:01:42
Nicene Creed? How do you get people to sign up to a faith like that, right?
01:01:59
And yet the persecution always leads to this explosion of growth. It scatters and wherever the persecution has scattered, it takes root and bears fruit.
01:02:11
It's amazing. That's taking place still today. You know, you think of the Chinese government, they've done everything they can to try to strangle and crush underground churches in China, and every action they take only solidifies that movement and attracts people to it.
01:02:26
It's one of those things, if these people are willing to die for this, this might be something worth living for. That's the attraction.
01:02:33
And the Chinese government doesn't know what to do. It's like, do we do an all -out war? Do we just befriend them? And it's like, how can we, what do we do with this?
01:02:40
They're not willing to play along. They're not willing to join the kind of official state church and kind of go, you know, go halves on power and influence, but then if we go against them, they just seem to increase and grow.
01:02:52
And so the image I've used is, you know, the tyrants try to stomp out Christianity, the fire of the faith, with gasoline boots.
01:03:00
Every stomp just leads to more fire, and we're gonna see that as we work through these chapters, but that's not to lighten the experience of suffering, and that's why
01:03:10
I chose as the first symbol for these kids' worksheets, the anchor. You know, we can look back and romanticize martyrs 2 ,000 years later, but we're talking about aunts and uncles and cousins and friends and fellow worshippers that were with you one week and then were gone the next.
01:03:27
And a lot of the people that are buried in those catacombs were martyrs, and you have certain symbols that venerate martyrs in certain sections of the catacombs.
01:03:38
Other questions or thoughts or reactions? You mentioned how the
01:03:46
Sadducees only believe in the books of Moses. That has been contested, because Josephus says that all the
01:03:53
Jews agree on the canon, and he is praised in Sadducees. In rabbinic records of Pharisees and Baptist Sadducees, the
01:04:04
Sadducees will cite passages from the prophets and the writings against the Pharisees on the resurrection.
01:04:09
It may be that the authors who said they only believe in the books of Moses confused them with the
01:04:16
Samaritans, who did only have the books of Moses, and that the difference why they didn't believe in angels, and angels are in, you know, the
01:04:25
Torah as well. And their objection to the resurrection is just their manner of interpreting their hermeneutic understanding of what the
01:04:32
Bible said. Yeah, very good. Sounds like some good stuff for a deeper study group. But the section where we're talking about how
01:04:39
James and the Apostles weren't as much persecuted during, you know, the first persecution where Stephen was.
01:04:47
Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. And honestly, that report in the
01:04:52
Narrative of Acts has several different views about how to understand all were scattered, but the
01:04:59
Apostles remained. Because of course, we get the sense that when persecution comes, the leaders are the bullseye.
01:05:06
Everything else is sort of consequential, but what you're going after is the head, the leaders, right?
01:05:12
And so, there's a few different viewpoints on how to understand that. But of course,
01:05:17
I think we have to collate that with how Paul understands the significance of the other Apostles in Jerusalem.
01:05:24
The pillars in Jerusalem and so on. We know from Galatians 2 that certain came from James and so on.
01:05:31
But in what follows in Acts, we see the significance of Peter. Paul is known colloquially as the
01:05:36
Apostle of the Gentiles, but really Peter is the premier, is the initial Apostle of the Gentiles, because he's the
01:05:42
Apostle that receives the great vision of all the food that God has made clean. And then he's the one that goes into Cornelius and Cornelius' household and sees them receive the
01:05:51
Spirit. And he testifies to that at the Great Council later on in Acts 15.
01:05:57
And so, I think we have to try to wrestle with, why is it that those that provoked and brought this persecution to bear upon the
01:06:09
Christians, the Jesus believers, didn't pressure or go after the
01:06:14
Apostles? Again, there's some interesting viewpoints that flow out of that, but my sense is,
01:06:25
Luke is recording the narrative in such a way that we're meant to see the significance of that Hebrew -Hellenistic division sprouting off in a certain way.
01:06:34
And in some ways, the contours of that Gentile expansion through Acts 10 and what follows leading up to Acts 15 has a lot to do with those who seem to be pillars, those
01:06:46
Apostles that remained in Jerusalem and the kind of origin of the Jerusalem church. So you have to be very sensitive to what
01:06:52
Luke is narrating, but I'll just say there's a lot of debate about how to understand that the Apostles remained, all except the
01:06:58
Apostles were scattered. I think we have time for maybe one or two more.
01:07:06
Questions, thoughts, reactions? We're drinking from a fire hose to get through those two chapters.
01:07:14
Chapter 2 sounded like you were preaching through Revelation. You get to Nero, the destruction of the Temple, and Israel, I mean, a
01:07:22
Jerusalem being sacked. I was going to say, you can really, when the historian says that he thinks there are 1 .1
01:07:30
million Jews killed in that fire, and then another 100 ,000 are taken into slavery, you can really see how, you know, in Matthew 25, whatever that is, it seems like, oh, this could be what he's talking about, for sure.
01:07:46
I mean, I think a 1 .1 million people in starvation, and everything that happened during those several years before it was toppled,
01:07:55
I mean, that's pretty significant. The world's population was a lot lower than, like, 1 .1
01:08:00
million is huge. That's huge. Yeah, Rome was the first million -person city, and it retained that status all the way up to Victorian England, when
01:08:10
London finally became a city of a million people. It's amazing to think about. When he says, you know, there's nothing like this, you know, we don't really have a dispensation list to point to.
01:08:22
Well, it's going to be, you know, at the end. I think maybe one, if there's any, raise your hand and cut me off, but maybe just a closing thought.
01:08:32
We spent a lot of time, even this morning, in Matthew 6, talking about God's providence, right?
01:08:39
What He's ordering and doing in our circumstances, in our relationships, in that very intimate, unique, and personal way,
01:08:46
He's teaching us and preparing us and maturing us and sanctifying us. So we've talked a lot about that sort of individualistic dimension of God's providence, but one of the things that's so wonderful about church history, and even this overview of these first two chapters is, look at how broad
01:09:03
God's providence is. Look at how He makes million -person cities and empires that surround the
01:09:10
Mediterranean Sea to bring about the conditions for the sake of the kingdom's advance, for the sake of the gospel being sown, churches being planted and cultivated.
01:09:20
And He uses the blessings and benefits of technology and dictators, you know, are not outside of that providential point of view.
01:09:28
And He even uses suffering and persecution and evil acts of men to bring about His good purpose and fulfill
01:09:38
His promise. So, you know, if we're going to reflect at all about God's personal, intimate providence in our lives, we also need to get a big picture of God's providence is working out huge things that we can barely wrap our minds around until we have enough centuries separating us that we can go, wow, praise
01:09:59
God. Like, what wonders He has done, what wonders to behold, right? God truly does move in a mysterious way.
01:10:07
And so I hope that every time we dig into this study, we'll come away with that kind of reflection.
01:10:13
Because it is part of our great faith and hope, right? I think
01:10:21
I'm very pragmatic and to try to think we understand what the Spirit's doing in our age and do to help it.
01:10:27
When you look at history and realize how little of each particular generation understood of their part in history, you really see that the important thing is being faithful and obedient.
01:10:37
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:02
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:23
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:54
It's why a lot of the New Testament calls are be faithful to the end. You don't have to understand what's going to happen or where it's going, you just have to be faithful.
01:12:03
And a lot of the New Testament exhortation is be patient and be faithful. Run the race with endurance, right?
01:12:10
Yeah. Amen. So with that, let's join our voices with a creed that our brothers and sisters have recited now for a millennium and a half, a little over that.
01:12:23
And you'll notice, so this is the Nicene Creed. It is the 1700th anniversary of the
01:12:28
Nicene Creed, and that's going to line up our study. Again, we're only going through half of this book, the first eight chapters.
01:12:34
When we get to that eighth chapter, it'll be the week of the Bolton Conference, which is all about the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed was drafted in 325, and so it's the 1700th anniversary of that date.
01:12:47
But you'll notice here, this form of the Nicene Creed is a later revision of it that was done at the
01:12:53
Council of Constantinople about 381, right?
01:12:59
I also have, you'll notice, toward the fourth paragraph with the Holy Spirit, in brackets
01:13:05
I have, and the Son. That also is a later revision that goes to about 589 at the
01:13:12
Council of Toledo. And so you should understand that this creed was something that was developed. That's not because the
01:13:17
Nicene Creed had something wrong that they had to repair, but it was insufficient and underdeveloped in certain specific ways.
01:13:24
It essentially has all this to say about the Son, and it ends with, and the Holy Spirit.
01:13:29
And you're kind of like, who is? You're waiting for more. And that led to its own history in the fourth century of those who rejected the personhood of the
01:13:41
Holy Spirit. And so that's what this council is largely correcting. This is a more full and,
01:13:46
I think, elaborate version of the Nicene Creed, and this is the one that is generally recited by churches throughout the world.
01:13:52
And so this is the one that we're going to recite every time. And I'd encourage you, you children, you should memorize this.
01:13:59
This is a creed that your brothers and sisters, they praised and they worshipped in light of it, and they suffered for it.
01:14:06
They suffered for the truths contained within it. And so we should read this with a certain sense of reverence and heritage.
01:14:13
Okay? So let's recite this together, and then I'll close us in prayer, and then we'll sing the
01:14:19
Gloria Patria, okay? So the Nicene Creed. We believe in one God, the
01:14:25
Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, and in one
01:14:33
Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten, begotten of the
01:14:40
Father before all ages, light of light, very God of very
01:14:45
God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the
01:15:01
Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the
01:15:17
Scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the
01:15:22
Father and he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.
01:15:31
And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the
01:15:38
Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets, and we believe in one holy
01:15:50
Catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
01:15:57
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
01:16:02
Amen. Father, we thank you for this night. Lord, as we begin this study, I pray for all of us, especially for young minds and ears,
01:16:11
Lord, that you would captivate and open our attention and our desire to learn about the history of our faith, to understand the issues of the day, the obstacles that were faced, and to see the resolve and the perseverance and faith of our ancient
01:16:27
Christian fathers and mothers. And Lord, I pray that we would learn from them, that we would rise to their challenge, to meet the demands of the world today with their faithfulness, that we might enter into their train to be worthy of the faith that they have passed down to us.
01:16:46
And we recognize, Lord, they so often suffered for their faith. Indeed, as Paul says, everyone who desires a godly life must suffer.
01:16:56
And so, Father, we see in their suffering that these men, these women of old were those of whom the world was not worthy.
01:17:03
And we would join their ranks, Lord. We pray by your Spirit you'd give us their faith, their devotion to you, their love for you,
01:17:11
Lord, that was even more precious than their own lives, that they could follow through as you commanded, that in order to save your life, you must be willing to lose it.
01:17:20
For all those who would save their lives will lose their lives, but those who are willing to lose their lives will save them.
01:17:26
We thank you, Lord, that you are our life. You are the anchor of our souls, our hope, the way, the truth, and the life.
01:17:32
We pray that you'd bless this study, bless us as a congregation to grow in these things, to piece together understanding and allow the history of our faith to become clear.