Heresy 101 (part 3)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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So this is week 3. Week 3, if you haven't been here or if you've missed a couple times, this is going to be the third session that we have regarding heresy and some of the definitions of heresy and what heresy is, what heresy is not.

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And I just want to cover a quick few areas that I did talk about last week for those who weren't here.

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And then I'll get into some new content. And then, time permitting, we'll see how things go, how well you guys participate.

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Time permitting, we'll get to the actual heresies that are kind of the key heresies throughout

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Christianity and even continue today, as you'll see. Were there any questions at all from previous times?

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So one of the things, so again, I'll just cover some of the quick things that we talked about last week. And that is, you know, a lot of the councils, a lot of the things that needed to come into place were really to prevent falsehood growing and continuing to grow in the church.

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And standards had to be defined. And that's where we start to see these councils come together, these doctrines come together, and so forth.

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We learned a little bit about that. Not only did the apostles provide the message itself, so as they taught, they provided the message, they also provided the interpretation.

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And what often happened is, when people would learn from others, they then would take it and they would tweak it a little bit.

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And it's kind of like that game of operator where, as it progresses, it would get, sometimes it would degrade in what it was from an interpretive perspective.

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So there was a concern around that, and they wanted to make sure that a lot of these things around Christianity would be solidified in a way that they would be able to last throughout the centuries.

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I did talk about, you know, can Christianity have multiple orthodoxies? And we talked a little bit about that, between primary, what orthodoxy is and what it is not.

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We talked about some of the fundamentals of the faith. We talked about some of the secondary items, such as baptism, communion, methods of worship, whether we have drums up here or not drums up here, whether we use an organ or a piano, whether we sing hymns or any other type of music.

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Those are all secondary items, so it's not really the Christian orthodoxy, per se.

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So these heresies that we're going to discuss and the areas that we're going to talk about really are attacking those core areas.

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So we talked about doctrines and creeds. We talked about the First Council of Nicaea, First Council of Constantinople, Council of Ephesus, and a few others.

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We'll go into a little more detail on those as we start digging into some of the actual heresies, so I don't want to go into any more detail on those.

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We talked about that creeds themselves are not what Christianity is all about, that Christianity also has a mystery around it, and we see that through the scriptures.

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Pastor Mike, if you're here this morning, talked about some of that, God's sovereignty, man's responsibility, and areas that that can play into.

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Then we talked a little bit about etymology. Who here remembers what etymology is? Etymology of a word.

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In the evolution of words throughout time, the actual definition from the dictionary says it is the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history or morphed or progressed throughout history.

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We see that with heresy. The word heresy, if you've been here in the other two sessions, the word heresy itself early on meant just a choice or a sect, someone who had a meaning of being able to set other choices.

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A lot of times those choices were secondary type of choices. They weren't things that would separate you from Christendom or any other type of religion at that point.

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And that was heresis. It was a Latin word, heresis, choosing or choice. Then it migrated into kind of a division, threatening unity in the first century.

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And then in the second century, the term actually got phrased as heterodoxy, which is a departure from orthodoxy, a complete removal, a separation of orthodoxy completely.

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So it was no longer just a choice or a choosing. Then we talked about where we closed last week is what heresy is not.

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So we had some definitions early of what heresy was. And if you weren't here last week, I'm going to read a couple more just because I have a few questions as we go through the text here.

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But we talked about what heresy is not. And one of the items that we had discussed is apostasy.

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And we talked about last week that apostasy is not a form of heresy by definition.

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Apostasy, its definition itself is the abandonment or renouncification of a religion or political belief.

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It is complete separation. I'm not pretending to be Christian. I am a Buddhist or I'm a

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Hindu or I'm from Islam. That is an apostasy as I wasn't, quote unquote, a

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Christian or I believed Christian theology. I've now departed that and moved on somewhere else. That is not what heresy is.

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We talked about from other religions. Other religions are not, quote unquote, heresy by definition.

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They are not in most cases trying to attack Christendom or other religions and so forth.

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We talked a little bit about denominations and sects, groups and so forth of different types.

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So we talked about different faiths a little bit. We said, you know, what is the difference? Why do we have Baptists and Lutherans and Methodists and so forth?

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And how do they still fit in the greater Christendom and are not being classified as heretical?

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Then we talked about error, erroneous teaching, error and schisms and heresy.

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And we left off with actually some definitions. One author had laid out some comparisons between the two and there were some great comparisons.

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I would recommend, time doesn't permit today, but if you have time, go back and listen to that. And it was just,

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I thought, a great way of laying out what heresy was. So what

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I want to jump into now, let's get into some areas. So is erroneous belief heretical?

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And I'm putting that out on the table. I see a shaking head over there in a hand.

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Steve? No. Why is it not? Good.

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Everyone agree with that? I hope so, because that's what I've been teaching most of this time.

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And by definition, errorous belief is this. Let me just give you the true definition. And that is a misconception resulting from incorrect information.

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So it can be simply someone who has taken the biblical text and if they don't have a solid teacher to learn from and they read something and they may read a portion of text and understand it in a way that the meaning isn't there, they may grab something and say,

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Oh, I discovered something new. And a couple of weeks ago, remember if I said, If you discover anything new, run from a person who says they've discovered something new in the

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Bible. But that is where erroneous belief is. It can turn into heretical belief if they understand what they're teaching is false.

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And we'll see that as a lot of these heresies grew initially from someone who had a firm belief in a doctrine or some type of teaching.

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And they were in Christendom and then they completely separated out because they wanted to hold to that belief.

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How about schisms? Who knows what a schism is? Schism? It's kind of a neat word.

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A rift? Good. A rift? Yeah. So it's a split or a division between strongly opposed sections or parties caused by differences in opinion or belief.

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Schisms. Can we be with brothers and sisters who have schisms?

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Christian schisms. I don't see many shaking of heads either way.

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I heard yes. Yeah. So we can, right? There are other brothers and sisters that hold various opinions, sometimes strongly opposing opinions to either our own or what we would think of from a

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Christian perspective. And yet we can still fellowship with them. Oftentimes they can still be

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Christian. Schisms are oftentimes why we see different denominations today is that breaking out of some of these secondary items, whether it's around music or certain secondary or tertiary types of doctrines.

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So now I want to kind of pull into and talk about heresy today. So I want to just talk a little bit about, well, let me say, some of the schisms.

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Who can name a couple of the schisms that we had? Jewish schisms from biblical times. What were some of the

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Jewish schisms? Not the actual schisms themselves.

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What type of groups were Sadducees? What? Pharisees. Judaizers.

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Judaizers we're going to talk about. The Essenes. Any others? Zealots. Yeah, zealots were one.

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There were a bunch of different groups and so forth. So those are just various examples of Jewish schisms.

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So today, how do we define heresy? We've talked about heresy the past two weeks.

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I defined it for you the first time last week. How do we define heresy? Who wants to give it a shot?

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Steve. Okay. Separates, offends, and destroys.

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Okay. Brian. From orthodoxy.

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Different from what orthodox Christianity would be defined, right? Those boundaries that are set. That's correct.

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I saw another hand over here somewhere. Bruce. Okay. Excellent.

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Excellent. Let me give you just a couple definitions here. I'll read three different definitions just to clarify.

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I think you guys have it though. The first is it's a teaching or teachings held by a factional group.

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I'm sorry, a factional religious party which deny some aspect of the established doctrine.

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New Testament writers give no toleration to heresy in the church and so forth. Another one says heresy is a sectarian group or teaching that deviates from the norm, quote, unquote.

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The Greek word heresis literally means choice. As we talked about, that was its earlier definition, and now it's a more modern definition.

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And one dictionary defines it this way. So the best modern kind of definition is this.

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In the modern era, comma, this is how the word heresy is usually understood. It is unorthodox and or false teaching that damages the faith of certain beliefs and also causes divisive factions within the church.

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It's pretty powerful, very, very powerful. So when we lightly call someone a heretic or say something as heresy, we have to be very careful because it truly is something that is damaging and divisive and is out there to be a false teaching.

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Another text says this. It says the only New Testament use of heresy, as we know it kind of today, so there were other terms that they used for heresy again as we talked about the choice with the

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Pharisees and the others. The term heresy, as we understand it today, the only place that it occurs in the

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New Testament is in 2 Peter 2 .1. And the heresy actually calls out the denial of Jesus Christ himself, the denial of the

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Redeemer. And we'll look at that in a little bit. You don't need to turn there now unless you want to. Among the recipients of heresies mentioned in the

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New Testament, the most prominent are Gnosticism. And we'll talk a little bit about what

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Gnosticism is as we get into the actual heresies themselves. But Gnosticism and another one called, some people call it

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Docetism or Docetism. So those are two that we will cover as we get into our text.

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So we looked at what heresy was first century. Look at what it is now. I want to take a look at some Bible passages. So hopefully you all have your

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Bibles. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to have three different passages read.

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And then I'm going to ask what heresy is being called out in these passages. What thing is being attacked in these passages?

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So I'll ask for some readers. If someone could read Acts 15, verse 1.

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Acts 15, verse 1. The second reader, if someone secondly will read for me,

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Galatians 6, 12 through 13. Galatians 6, 12 through 13.

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And then time permitting, we'll do this one. I have a longer one that kind of calls things out, but Titus 1 .10.

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Titus 1 .10. Titus 1 .10. So we have the three of them are

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Acts 15 .1, Galatians 6, 12 through 13, and Titus 1 .10.

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Someone read Acts 15 .1 for me? Sure. Okay.

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Who can read Galatians 6, 12 through 13 for me, please?

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Bruce. Excellent, thank you.

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How about Titus 1 .10? Someone write Titus 1 .10? Yes, Joel. So what do we have here?

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One, what are they attacking? And what is this group that we're talking about here in these three verses?

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Judaizers is who, right? What are they attacking? What is the heresy here that we're talking about from the

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Judaizers? Okay, which really ties down to what?

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Work salvation, right? So there really are work salvation. And in some ways, what we'll see as we look through some of these others is very legalistic.

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Legalism is one of the key areas. But definitely they're attacking salvation, and salvation not by Christ, but salvation by works is what the

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Judaizers were attacking. All right, second one here, second test for you guys.

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How about someone read for me, please, 2 John 1 .7? 2

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John 1 .7. And then 1

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John, so 2 John 1 .7. Next one is 1 John 2, 22 through 23.

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22 through 23. Why don't we just do those two? So who can read 2

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John 1? Steve. Excellent.

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How about 1 John 2, 22 through 23? Yeah. Okay, excellent.

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What is the heresy here? The deity of Christ, right?

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The deity of Christ is what's being attacked here. Do we see anything else? I'm sorry,

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Trinity, as I heard? Doctrine of the Trinity, key also, yes? Yeah, I mean, ideally here it's the personhood of Jesus Christ.

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The deity of Christ and his personhood and everything else is being attacked here. Trinity is definitely being attacked because you're removing these other two components already, right?

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Third one here, so if I can get some people to read, looking for 2 Thessalonians 2, 1 through 2.

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2 Thessalonians 2, 1 through 2. And then we'll do

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Matthew 24, 4 through 5. Matthew 24, 4 through 5.

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And then whoever is also in Matthew in that same area, we'll have someone else read it. But Matthew 24, and it'll be 23 through 24.

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23 through 24. So 2 Thessalonians 2, 1 through 2.

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Matthew 24, 4 through 5. And Matthew 24, 23 through 24.

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Okay, how about Matthew 24, 4 through 5? Matthew 24, 4 through 5,

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Steve? Excellent.

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Excellent. And then how about Matthew 24, 23 through 24? Matthew 24, 20,

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Bruce? All right, so what is the heresy here that we're talking about?

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What's being called out? False prophets.

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What else? Second coming of Christ, right?

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Amongst these three, it's the second coming of Christ that, again, is a key doctrine.

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Christ is going to return, and yet here we have these deniers in this text that are directly attacking the return of Jesus Christ.

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So let's move into real quick. So we talked a little bit about heresy. So what's a heretic?

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Pretty strong word, especially if you point to someone. And, again, you'll see as I talked in my very first class, we talked about most of the time when

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I was looking up heresy, it was two Christians that were pointing at each other and saying, you're a heretic. What would be a heretic in your understanding?

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Right. Okay, that calls out a heretic. What would be a definition of a heretic?

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Okay, let me give you the great definition of the dictionary, and it says this, a person believing or practicing a religious heresy.

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Got to love those, right? It's always, you know, look it up. So another definition a little further down said this, a person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.

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A person holding odds with what is generally accepted. Now, I don't like that definition, personally, because I don't think it's generally accepted.

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I don't think it's always, you know, a person definitely is going to hold it at odds, but something that is generally accepted is something that I would argue with because these are fundamentals of the faith that are not generally accepted.

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Yes, Steve? Yes. Yeah, and it's interesting because generally accepted, well, what's it accepted by, right?

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Is it man's acceptance or is it what the Bible says is the truth, right?

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So if it's generally accepted, yeah, we just accept it. We tolerate everything and so forth. It gets pretty muddy through that definition.

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But definitely, you know, a person at odds with a doctrine or orthodoxy is something that is critical that we see here.

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So let me ask kind of a pointed question here, and hopefully this will get your brains kick -started a little bit this morning, and that is, is heresy only a

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Christian issue? I see a no and a hand.

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Yes or no? You think it is only a Christian issue? Okay. Okay, hold your thought.

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Correct. Christianity, based on the Mormon Church. Right. Yes. Yes.

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Yeah, I mean, this definitely is more of a philosophical question, and that is, by definition, is it only a

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Christian thing, right? And the true answer is it isn't, because we can have, quote -unquote,

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Mormon heretics. We can have Jehovah's Witness heretics. Again, we're most of those, as they would call us out.

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But it's surprising that Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, all of these groups have groups that have splintered off of them and gone off in their own directions and would essentially be, by definition, considered heretical groups.

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And what's interesting is, as we talk about this a little bit, and I know I'll open up a big can of worms doing this, so we'll go through it quick, but who was called out as one of the biggest heretics in the

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Reformers period? Martin Luther. By whom?

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The Catholic Church called him out as a heretic, right? So based on Catholic doctrine, which is different than what we have in Protestant Christianity, right?

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Martin Luther himself was called out as a heretic, and many others. There were others who took their lives.

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If you read Foxe's Book of Martyrs, you will find that there are plenty out there who held to the Christian orthodoxy as we know it and what

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Scripture tells us, which went against the Catholic Church and died for their faith in often horrific ways.

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And yet it was important enough for them to withhold or to hold on to what Christianity was than to give up that faith.

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So heresy is really just a set of constructed beliefs of a community in most cases, and that's why, by true definition, heresy can be across all different types.

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In one of the definitions I had actually even talked about political nature, so you can have political heresy and other things going on, so really from his general sense.

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But for our definition and our terms and the use of here in this class, heresy really is around Christianity and Christian heresies.

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So I want to get into a couple things here, and this is kind of the core areas, and we'll talk a little bit more in detail as we go through it.

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But let me pose it out here to the group first, and then we'll see how many of these you hit on.

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Why is Christian heresy, now I'll define it that way, why is Christian heresy dangerous?

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Why is it dangerous? Why do we even care? Why am I up here? Why do

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I want you guys to know about this stuff? John?

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Misleads people? Okay, good. Bruce? Souls are at stake, okay?

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More hands? Steve? Authority of scripture is a key area where most people falter when we talk about heresy, and as we go through some of the heresies you'll see that in great detail.

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Anything else? Any other reasons why it's dangerous? Yeah, we should wake up to these warnings, right, that are given.

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True. Anything else over here? I know I've been picking over on this side more. Bruce? And do we see that, you know, we talk about Old Testament, New Testament talks a lot about it and so forth, do we see even after the scripture was written that heresy was called out often?

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I mean, I think we do, right? We see throughout history Orthodoxy was being defended in many ways, and thankfully by some very, very smart men that would stand up to some of these heresies, and as we go through some of them you'll see there were times, and again,

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God is sovereign, I don't want to ever forget that, there were times where it was questionable whether a heresy would become

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Orthodoxy or not in some parts until someone just fought and fought and fought and people realized scripture is true.

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So let me just give you six areas that were quickly called out here as to why, and some of these we just touched on, but the first is it denies one or more of the fundamentals of the faith, and as we just saw earlier this morning, the return of Jesus Christ, who

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Christ was, the Trinity, salvation by works rather than through the grace of God as a gift, as Pastor Mike talked about even this morning in the message.

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So it denies one or more of the fundamentals of the faith. The second is it's really a

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Trojan horse. It's really a Trojan horse. It's said to be an alternative belief system.

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It's not just tweaks and tunes and I likes compared to dislikes. It is an alternate belief system, and it's designed to mislead, and it really does.

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It's an alternate belief system from what Orthodoxy would be defined as. Steve.

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That's right. True enough. Yes. Yeah, because that's the only way we try to rationalize it humanly, right?

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And there are times, and that's what I talked about earlier, there are times where we have to just say there are mysteries in Scripture that we have to believe, but we might not fully understand it or comprehend it ourselves until we're on the other side of glory, right?

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And that's critical. So we have a Trojan horse. The second definition or the second kind of example someone gave is it's a virus, and it's not only just a virus but a virus that actually needs a host system, and it requires a host system essentially.

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So it's like a parasite in most cases. So not only is it a Trojan horse sitting and waiting and usually kind of comes out little by little by little and tries to pull others into its belief system, it ends up being this virus that grows within the body itself.

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And it's interesting because, again, heresy in and of itself is not something outward into the church.

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It is within the church with an attempt to disrupt the body, and that's what we talked about two weeks ago is it's an internal attack.

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Fourth is that it comes from within. So it's this Trojan horse. It's a virus. It comes from within, and I have here in my notes it's one of the scariest and unsettling thoughts is that it comes from within Christendom itself.

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It could even be taught by a local body of believers. It could be taught by people who know the truth, and yet they want to teach something differently, and it comes from within.

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Again, this is not destruction coming from the outside. Fifth is it can lead to ultimate unbelief for others.

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So this heretical teaching, and we're not talking about those who have been saved by the grace of God.

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We're talking about those who have come into the church and have grown in the church and understand Christendom, and someone can come in and teach heretical beliefs and teaching, and they can be led astray and off into these other areas.

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And the sixth I have, which is very similar to the others, but it's a divisive teaching or practice.

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Its sole purpose, its sole intention of heresy is to divide or to bring disunity to the body, and heresy does a great job of that.

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It is designed to be, one author said this, heresy is designed to subvert, and its intended purpose is to be destructive in nature.

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Heresy is to subvert as intended to be destructive in nature. So does that sound like the fruits of the

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Spirit? Steve? And do we see that as a primary within Christian theology?

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It is a command that we're given to evangelize, but does it lay out in Scripture? Remember we talked about different methods that people have, secondary, truciary, it depends on how people want to witness.

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Some people do that at work, some people do it door to door, and that's where we get this divisiveness that comes into the body.

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No, and you know, it's surprising because... Yes. And it's interesting because, well, sometimes, most cases they don't at the beginning, but then they hold to this truce, and you'll see that as you study the history of a lot of these heretics, is they thought, again, they've come upon something that Christianity has been wrong from the beginning, we must now change it, and they truly believe that in their hearts.

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I mean, I don't want to say, you know, the Disney heart thing, but they truly believe it, that they can rationalize that this is truth, and that everyone should know about this truth.

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And then at the same time, they're though going against what orthodoxy has said for centuries in most cases.

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And it's right. I think it starts with good intentions in most cases, but it grows to this subversiveness and destructive nature.

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So heresy must be condemned. How am I doing time -wise here? Heresy must be condemned.

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We see that in Scripture. Who wants to read for me Titus 3, 10 through 11?

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Titus 3, 10 through 11. And then

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I'll have someone else read 2 John 1, 9 through 11.

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So Titus 3, 10 through 11, and then 2

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John 1, 9 through 11. Will. Excellent.

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And 2 John 1, 9 through 11 from someone, please. Yes, Joel.

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Excellent. Excellent. So we see from Scripture, at least, heresy is attacked, and often fairly severely.

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Do we see that today? It's hard to say because we ourselves,

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I mean, as a church don't always have visibility into the greater church, but do we see heresy being called out for heresy's sake or for truly what heresy is?

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Or, again, is this postmodern, more modernism type of environment got us where we don't want to call anyone out as false teachers?

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Yes. Generally accepted, right?

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So that's what everyone else accepts rather than Scripture. So we definitely see,

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I mean, Scripture does say it needs to be dealt with. It needs to be dealt with harshly and quickly from a heretical perspective.

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And a lot of times heresy comes out of those who are teaching. So you want to cut it off at the root and deal with it, get it out as fast as possible so that you're not having to, as it grows and continues to wage war within the local body itself.

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It's important. So if I were to say, if we were talking about heresy and we wanted to study a book of the

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Bible, what's probably the number one book that comes to mind around heresy? Galatians is a good one.

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Not the one I'm thinking of, so you're wrong. But close again.

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1 John is also excellent. 2 Peter, also very good. A lot of examples from 2

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Peter. I'm actually just looking for Jude. And really we see

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Jude dealing with a lot of heresy, a lot of issues come up in the book of Jude.

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All the others were right. I mean, again, most of my scriptural references come from the other texts that you guys had mentioned.

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But the book of Jude, a very small book indeed, but it's written specifically around that.

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And I just want to give a couple items here about the book of Jude, and then I'm going to run out of time, and we'll never get to the heresies, and we'll have to find another time to do that.

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So the book of Jude begins with a purpose of discussing common salvation.

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So Jude is very excited. Common salvation with his readers in verse 3. If you want to turn there, you can turn there and take a look and see.

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It's funny because in my notes here I say, you know, Mike often takes a jet tour of things. So he's taking the jet.

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A couple weeks ago we had Steve took the helicopter, right, and hop and hop and hop and hop and hop. This is kind of one of those spy satellite views, right?

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So we're way out here. I just want to take a real quick view just to cover some of these areas due to time.

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And then, like I said, we'll talk about specific heresies another time.

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So Jude, you know, why was it written? Just some of the notes I have here again. Definitely for this common salvation with his readers as we see in verse 3.

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But because of an urgency of the situation, Jude also changed his purpose. So as he's going through the text, he kind of changes the direction to discuss the problem of false teachers.

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And not only discuss false teachers in general, but also to denounce false teachers.

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So his purpose was now we have this common salvation. Let's talk about these false teachers that are coming in.

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And then I would need to denounce them. Jude also writes to defend the faith against false teachers.

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So, again, we see here that there's a defense that he brings up. And the note here says that, you know, his whole purpose was to go against antinomianism.

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One of those great big theological types of words. Who can tell me what antinomianism is? Anti meaning against or not.

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What's nomianism? Law. Law. So what would that be? What's antinomianism?

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What's another word that we would use? Lawlessness. Yeah, lawlessness. So he's writing against these false teachers to prevent lawlessness.

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He says, you know, the Scripture has this common salvation. And it's these doctrines that are laid out. And there's orthodoxy that's laid out.

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And here are these teachers that now I have to battle that are teaching all sorts of things that go against this doctrine.

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And it's lawlessness. Next, Jude writes to warn believers not to be led astray by false teachers.

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He urges them to rescue those who have already been. So in verse 23, he is struggling to say, not only do we need to get rid of these false teachers and ignore what they're teaching you, but we need to go back and rescue and teach those who erroneously believed what these false teachers said and have been led astray.

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The fifth one is that Jude writes to emphasize to those who do evil.

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So those who are doing evil will be judged by the Lord. So he says, the Lord will address those or deal with those.

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It's, you know, we need to call them out. We need to warn. We need to pull back those and rescue them.

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But ultimately, we need to understand that God also will be the one who will deal with the souls of these false teachers.

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So what are some of the false teachings we see in the book of Jude? I want to just go through some of these false teachings that we see.

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It's noted here that the actual heresy is not called out. We don't see in the book of Jude an actual heresy that says, you know, this is the group, the

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Judaizers, or this is another group and this is what they're teaching. So it's not identified in our text, the exact heresy that's being taught here.

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But what we do see from the letter is we get an understanding that this heresy may have some items that we can pull out and understand the heresy that's occurring.

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So let me just give you some of those. So these are the things that we understand about the doctrine of the false teachers.

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Here is where the false teachers believe their doctrine to be based on this text in Jude.

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In verse 4a, it's a misunderstanding of the concept of grace.

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They misunderstand what grace is. And quickly they move to 4b.

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Not only do they misunderstand the concept of grace, but they deny Jesus Christ himself in 4b.

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If you look down at verse 8, you'll see they prefer their own dreamings rather than God's revelation.

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They want to have dreams, dream a dream and have all these other great things. Everything apart from the scriptures do they want.

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They want their own beliefs. So we see that they want these dreaming, their own dreams over God's own word.

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It's the authority of scripture they're attacking. And then also in verse 8 and in verse 19, we see a misunderstanding of the doctrine of the

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Holy Spirit. That he's absent. They actually take out the Holy Spirit.

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He's removed from this portion of text. And the last doctrine that we can see again is also in verse 8.

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They were critical towards the orthodox doctrine of angels. They actually were attacking what the orthodox doctrines are around angels.

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And let me give a couple practices. So these are now just practices that we can see again from the book of Jude. In verses 4, 7, 16 and 18, they're called out to be lascivious or lawless.

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Again, not a fruit of the Spirit. If you think it is, go read your Fruits of the Spirit. In verses 11a and 16, they are unrighteously destroying for their own gain.

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It's that destructive nature, heresy that we talked about earlier. 11b says they're corrupt and pervert for their own personal gains.

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Again, they want to have their own gain in things. They don't want to give God the glory. They want to give themselves the glory.

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In verse 11c, they blaspheme and rebel against divine authority in and of itself.

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Again, this is the heretics that we're seeing here. This is their practices. Verse 8 and 23 of the book of Jude says this, that they ruled by their passions which defined themselves.

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Their passions defined themselves, not the Holy Scriptures. And lastly, from the passage, what we see about their practices is in verse 16.

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They are arrogant and they often wanted to use people for their own gains. They wanted to use people for their own gains.

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So the identity, what we have here, how do they identify themselves? How are they identified throughout the book of Jude? And let me just give you a couple of quick things here and then we'll close.

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We know that they are a part of the Christian community from verse 4. Verse 4.

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The second one is, well, the deception leads towards a Gentile background essentially.

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We understand that they may include Jews in some of their belief systems or some of their ideas.

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So we really have a good mixing of Jewish and Gentile background, it appears, from both their doctrines and their practices.

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And one author said this about all this text, about all these contexts around their practices and their doctrines.

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He says this. It says, it may suggest an insipid form of Gnosticism.

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And we'll get into what Gnosticism is. I know most of you have heard the term. But he says it may suggest an insipid form of Gnosticism.

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So an early form of Gnosticism, not well defined. But the true

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Gnosticism actually unfolds during the second century. The time of the second century is when Gnosticism really begins to grow and unfold and grow into what we know it is today.

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And he says, so from this evidence we see that there's this Gnosticism kind of wrapped around into it. And that the heresy really is a direct threatening of the apostolic teachings.

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And that there may be a better choice. There may be this secret knowledge, this secret understanding. And that's kind of where this

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Gnosticism comes in. This, I believe in my gut. Or I had a dream. Or I feel a certain way.

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That's what Gnosticism is really based off of. And we'll talk about that at another time.

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And it's actually a good time to stop. Because then the next couple of pages I have specifically go through the various Christian heresies.

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And kind of the top five heresies that have essentially troubled Christianity from first century all the way up into our modern time today.

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Are there any questions? I know we're getting short on time. Any questions generally about heresy or anything about what we talked about today?

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Happy to come back and answer anything specific. And then, like I said, we'll stop another time to go through the direct heresies themselves.

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Yes. It is. It is.

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Yeah, so the question is, is omission of things. So omission of truth is leaving out the gospel.

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Leaving out subtle things that are very key to what orthodoxy is. Is that heretical? And it is.

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It is. You don't see it as often discussed that way. But by definition, it is.

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It is being destructive. It is dealing with salvific issues. It is dealing with the fundamentals of the faith.

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And removing it is just as much as teaching something that is false. Right? Yes. Yes.

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Yes. Yes. Correct.

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Correct. Yeah, it's interesting because I had in my notes here as we were talking about, you know, is it a

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Christian -only thing? And, you know, those who have studied Mormonism, you know, we are the heretical church.

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So outside of Mormonism, Steve, you may have better input on this, but we would be considered heretical because we do not follow the teachings of Joseph Smith and so forth.

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And yet they want to be part of Christendom. And it's just kind of interesting. Any input on that, Steve? And rightfully we should.

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Right? So, yes, Steve. Correct.

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The Protestant church based on Catholic doctrine is anathema. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah. Key.

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Mike. Yes. Yes.

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Right. Yeah, and I think that's key, right? I mean, again, it gets down to what is being taught. And is it coming from Scripture and Scripture alone?

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Or is it something over and above? And we'll see that as we look at the other heresies where oftentimes Scripture is put to the side.

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Steve. Sure. I believe so.

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Right. We're going to be here. I'm assuming. Yeah. OK. All right. Part four next week.

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Look at that. Steve settled it. It's settled. As Pastor Mike said, right? You do it and make it happen.

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So what we'll do is we'll look at some heresies. Again, 1st century, 2nd century, 4th century, 16th century, 5th century.

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So 21st century, there's a ton of them. We probably couldn't cover all those at all. But, again, I want to cover the top five.

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If we have time to cover some others. I think I had listed that I was going to research anywhere upwards of about 16 common, pretty,

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I don't want to say just common, but known or well -documented heresies. These are kind of the top five is what

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I want to cover. So we'll see what time permits tomorrow or next week. Thank you, Steve. All right.

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Let me pray. And then if, again, any other questions you might have, feel free to come up to me. And we'll jump into the rest of this next week.

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Lord, we want to thank you. We want to praise you again for this opportunity that we've had to look at scripture.

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Lord, the time that we've had to understand and learn about what heresy is, what a heretic is.

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Lord, the importance of what the body of believers during the 1st century even did.

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Lord, they rooted it out. They attacked it. Lord, they didn't do it just by their own knowledge, their own understanding, their own desires.

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But, Lord, they went after it with the scripture. And, Lord, they were able to defeat it only through the power of your word.

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And we thank you, Lord, that you provided your word, a way that we can root out this heresy. We can prevent heresy.

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Lord, we can prevent error even in people's understandings through it. But, Lord, we don't take the glory for that.

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We give you the glory. We give you the praise. And we just thank you that you even have provided us a word that we can have a word that is authoritative, without error, and fully true.