Through The Church Age (part 1)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Our Father in heaven, we come before you this morning, your children granted access to your throne because of the work of your son.

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We praise you for that. We thank you for sending him to redeem us, to do for us what we could not do for ourselves.

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Father, as we look to even what he has done over the last 1 ,900 years plus,

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Father, we just praise you for the faithfulness of Christ Jesus, for his steadfast stewardship over the church.

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Father, we pray that our time, as we look to his work through the church, we pray that it would be a blessing to us, that we would be mindful that even the men we study are flawed, but you are not.

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And you, your son, and the Holy Spirit continue to work in the church and through the church this very day.

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And we praise you and thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, so we have

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Pastor Bob here. He was the answer to the trivia question, when did the church age start?

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Turns out it wasn't Pentecost at all. It was on Pastor Bob's birthday, when he came into the world, that was the beginning of the church age.

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He says that's true, so I'll go with it. I'm using a few books. Today, we're mostly gonna be focused on one from Christian History Made Easy.

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No, it doesn't come in a yellow book and it's not Christian History for Idiots. Christian History Made Easy by Timothy Jones, who has his doctorate from Southern Seminary.

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Then Theologians You Should Know by Michael Reeves. And In the Year of Our Lord by Sinclair Ferguson.

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I wanna spend a moment though talking about a subject that Pastor Mike talks about quite a bit that we don't often define.

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And that subject is biblicism. Anybody know what biblicism is?

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Sounds good, doesn't it? I'll have a double dose of biblicism, yes. Is it the worship of the

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Bible? Survey says, well, it's close. I mean, you'd probably get like fourth best answer up there.

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Survey said 12. Ding. Okay, is the next family wanna do better?

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Biblicism. Okay, true or false? We believe in scripture alone.

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True. That's one of the principles of the Reformation. So with that said, here's the basic idea of biblicism.

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The Bible alone, so far so good, is to rule our lives, so far so good.

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And everyone is equally equipped to divine the meaning of the text. Maybe, maybe not.

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Merriam -Webster defines it this way, adherence to the letter of the text of the Bible.

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Can you think of any problems with that? Or let me put it this way.

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What's the difference between sola scriptura and solo? One word, not

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S -O -L -O -W. Yeah, it's scary. Okay, you need the

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Holy Spirit, absolutely. And that's,

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Becky said, you can make the scripture say whatever you want, and that's probably where the problem comes in.

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I was reading an article, oddly enough, that I posted on Facebook that Pastor Mike said to me. And I liked it.

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In part, it was about biblicism, but part of what it said was that,

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I guess I needed to define biblicism better, but one of the dangers is what Becky said, which is biblicism, that is to say the

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Bible alone, can mean, and I've seen it mean in certain churches that'll remain unnamed, but they're in Iowa and elsewhere, that the pastor is the only person who can give the right interpretation of the

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Bible. Okay? That what he says goes. So for example, if he says that elders, you're to submit to your elders because otherwise they wouldn't have joy in the way that you submit to them or whatever, whatever

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Hebrews 13, 17 says. And the elders are to give oversight to the members of the church, right?

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Because they're going to give an answer for it. So some people will say, well, that means that the elders should be intricately involved in your lives.

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That is to say that, you know, Pastor Mike should say, meet with all the members of the

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Crane family, including all the ladies of the Crane family alone and talk to them.

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That's how this one church does that. And, you know, we would all say, well, that doesn't sound right.

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And they do a lot of odd things, but here, let me just give you this from Kevin DeYoung.

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He says, the significance of any, he's talking about biblicism. He says the significance of any biblical text can be understood without, listen, without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the

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Bible from scratch. That's biblicism. And what it means is that every generation has to rediscover the truths of scripture, which leads to, say, for example, somebody reading through the

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Old Testament and seeing texts like the arm of the Lord is not too short, and therefore concluding

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God has an arm, right? The eyes of the

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Lord are on the righteous. God has eyes, therefore he has a physical body, and you wind up being a

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Mormon. R.

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Scott Clark said, he says, we are sinful. How many agree with that?

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I hope everybody agrees with that. When we approach scripture and pretend to be neutral, we are prone to, here's one of my favorite words to say, er, or er, but I like er better.

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Make mistakes. Thus, anti -Trinitarians determined beforehand that there cannot be a, or there cannot be one

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God, and look for evidence to prove their points. That's what

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I did for many years. In fact, I would take situations like Jesus' baptism as a

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Mormon, and I would turn that into an anti -Trinitarian diatribe, and I won't go into how, but it, cause it doesn't matter.

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I could make the Bible stand on its head. And he also says,

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Clark does, that our feelings and our experiences can taint our understanding of scripture.

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How does that happen? We go with our emotions.

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Let me give you an example. This is one that I remember fondly, because I was just a witness just standing there going,

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I watched a believer in his thirties and his grandmother debate when he got saved.

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She was saying, you got saved at age seven. Don't you remember, you prayed the prayer and you came forward and da, da, da, and he's like, but grandma, in my teen years,

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I took up drugs and all kinds of sexual perversions and da, da, da, da, I didn't get saved till, you know, late in my twenties.

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Oh no, that's not right. Based on her experience and her own desires for other people in her family, she didn't want to think that he had not been saved when he prayed the prayer or did whatever he did.

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So we impose our belief system on scripture rather than letting scripture influence us.

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Clark goes on to say, he says, the confessional Protestants, by contrast, beginning with Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, et cetera, were committed to the sole, unique, final, and pers,

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I should have practiced, perspicuous, the clear, let's just say that right up front, authority of scripture as the word of God, but none of them read scripture as if they were the first to read it.

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And that's the idea of biblicism, coming to the scripture as if you're the very first person so that your understanding is supreme.

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They regarded scripture as normative and definitive as the final authority. They did not start with reason or religious experience.

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In other words, they didn't rely upon themselves or their own experiences. And I want to go to a few verses.

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Let's look at 2 Timothy chapter one. And I want to make sure I have the verse right.

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So I'm not going to announce the verse till I go there. I'm pretty sure it was verse 12, but you know, that's just an approximation.

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See, am I not glad I didn't say that? Okay, it's verse 14. By the

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Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you, which was what?

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Go back to verse 13. Follow the pattern of sound words, of the sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

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He wants him to guard those things that he heard from Paul. Paul wants Timothy to guard those things.

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Turn over to chapter two, verse two, or yes, that's right, okay.

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I'll start with verse one. You then my child be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.

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I mean, we could call this discipleship, we could call it teaching, but here's the point.

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And what he's saying is, what I taught you, guard. What you are guarding, pass on to other men.

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Faithful men who will then do what? Pass it on to others. In other words, the idea is, well, if we could just put it in the words of Jude, right?

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What does Jude say in verses three and four? He wants, he was going to write about something else and then he decides to, he's going to defend the once for all delivered faith.

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You know, the final word. The contents of scripture do not change.

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So when people come up with new innovations, we should be very wary. And if we say, well, we want to come to scripture with fresh eyes,

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I also say you should be very wary. I've told this story before, but I remember even, I think

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I was in, maybe it was before I got to seminary, right about those times.

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Mike told me, he says, hey, if you go by the book shack, he goes, check out this translation of the

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New Testament that they just started selling. And he goes, it wasn't about reading the

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New Testament. He said, just read the preface. So I read the preface and the preface said that the author or the translator had discovered many nuances that no one had ever seen before.

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They no longer sell that book, thankfully. That's just a bad idea.

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It's the once for all delivered faith. We don't change things. We're not here to, we're not tinkerers, I guess is a good way we could say it.

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So understanding a little bit, the importance of church history and the fact what

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I want to do as we go through this, we won't do it much today, we will more next week, is

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I want us to look at the big picture in the sense that there are issues that come up sometimes repeatedly throughout church history.

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And God raises men up to defend the truth. The truth doesn't change, it gets assaulted, right?

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We guard the truth. It's like we're on the inside of a fort and the world, Satan, and sometimes weak believers, sometimes false believers are attacking it from outside and sometimes inside.

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We don't want to be the people on the inside attacking, but that's the idea. We're to guard that, we're to guard the truth.

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Now let's turn to Matthew chapter 16. And obviously these will be the words of Jesus.

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So if you have these in the red letter version, feel free to underline them. No, I'm kidding. I go on this whole thing about red letters and black letters.

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They're all equally inspired. Jesus Christ is as much the author of Leviticus chapter 12 as he is, you know,

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Matthew 16 here. Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, oh,

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I'm sorry, 1613, who do people say that the son of man is? And they said, some say

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John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.

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He said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the

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Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you

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Simon Bar -Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven.

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And I tell you, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell or Hades or death, whatever your translation says, shall not prevail against it.

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Now, just looking at verse 18, there are some things that you can deduce about what

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Jesus is saying here. I mean, first of all, who's going to build the church? There are a lot of church gurus who tell you how to grow a church.

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Jesus says, I will build, you know, it would be one thing if he said, you will build my church.

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The church depends on you. No, he says, I will build my church. But notice the second part, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

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Well, what does that tell you about the gates of hell? They're more than gates, okay?

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They're not pearly. They're going to try to prevail, right?

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This is spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare isn't about demons and angels, you know, battling in unseen ways that we don't notice.

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What it is, is about ideas. In fact, Paul writes in second Corinthians, he says, you know, we are battling against fortresses and all these kinds of things.

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And he says, we bring every thought captive. It's the ideas that are out there. That's where the warfare is.

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That's where the spiritual warfare is. That's what we are to guard against, this bad doctrine coming into the church.

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Let's look at Acts chapter one. Again, the principal parts from Matthew 18.

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Jesus is going to build his church. There are going to be assaults against the truth, assaults against the church.

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They will not prevail, why? Because Jesus is building his church. Acts chapter one.

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We get some kind of idea of how the church is going to be built here.

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This is Luke, the physician writing. And by the way, in the first book, what's he talking about?

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In the first book, what's the first book he wrote? Luke, right? In the first book, oh,

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Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the

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Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them 40 days or during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God.

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And while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the father, which he said, you heard from me, which he was talking about.

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Well, we'll see here in a moment, day of Pentecost, but for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the

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Holy Spirit, not many days from now. So when they had come together, they asked him,

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Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? Are you going to establish your kingdom right here on earth right now?

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He said to them, it was not for you to know times or seasons that the father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the

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Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

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So here's the idea. Just in shorthand, we have this truth, we have this deposit and the apostles had it, right?

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And so what are they doing? They're going to be Jesus' witnesses in Jerusalem first, and then

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Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. What are you supposed to the end of the earth meant?

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Everywhere, right? So, and that's what we're doing now. We're continuing that work of the apostles.

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Now we get to history a little bit. The first chapter has to do with 64

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AD to 77 AD. We're still in the New Testament. How do we know that we're still in the New Testament?

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When was the last book of the New Testament written? New Testament.

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I was trying to do the math there, you know. And end of the first century, 95 AD, I'm like, 400,

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I don't read, okay. You fooled me. Brian, Brian knows what he's talking about.

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Okay. Yeah, about 95 AD is Revelation, about 90 AD is the

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Gospel of John. So 64 AD, we're still in the New Testament. We're towards the end of a lot of the books.

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I think most of them are completed by the end of the 60s. And then there are just a few more after that.

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Okay, so who were the Christians? What did the world think of them back then?

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You know, if you think Christians have a bad name now, it was a lot worse then.

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It's interesting though, because if you think about it, this is logical. How do you think unbelievers back then, especially the

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Romans, what would they think about the Christians? And that's the question. What's that?

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Okay. Yes, heretics. And that's how the

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Jews would see them as well. But the Romans saw them as a heretical branch,

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I guess you could say, of the Jewish religion. Now, Judaism was not well -received by non -Jews, the religion itself.

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And Christianity was not well -received by anybody. Let's look at Acts chapter 16 and verses 16 to 24.

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Notice I drink water here because I want to show that I'm not a professional. Inside joke.

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Acts 16, verses 16 to 24. As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling.

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She followed Paul and us to the place of prayer. Again, this is Luke writing.

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Crying out, these men are servants of the most high God who proclaim to you the way of salvation.

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Now that's good, right? Well, kind of, but not really. And this she kept, well, we'll find out.

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And this she kept doing for many days, Paul having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, the spirit of this girl,

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I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And it came out that very hour.

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But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized

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Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. You wrecked our livelihood.

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Verse 20, and when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, these men are

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Jews, right? This was their understanding of these

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Christians. These men are Jews and they are disturbing our city.

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They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.

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The crowd joined in attacking them. So much for the ability to have freedom of religion.

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The crowd joined in attacking them and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods.

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And when they had inflicted many blows against them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely.

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Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.

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All this for preaching the gospel. But these men are

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Jews. That's how they were perceived. Some Jewish leaders saw the Christians as defectors from Judaism or heretics.

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Christians believe that Christianity represented the end of the finer points of the

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Jewish law, right? You no longer had to worry about what happened to your cow if it ate somebody else's grass on the

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Sabbath or any of that stuff. All those Old Testament laws were done away with, why?

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Because Jesus perfectly obeyed them. And some even portrayed themselves or proclaimed themselves to be the

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Israel of God, meaning the chosen people of God, the

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Christians were the Israel of God. And it's interesting, because when

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I looked at that phrase, the Israel of God, what does it mean? Because I don't want to go down that road.

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I briefly put it this way. MacArthur said that the Israel of God meant that these were

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Jews. They had to be Jews who had converted to Christ. Others, more covenantal, see the phrase as indicative of both

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Jews and Gentiles who follow Christ. So difference there. Anyway, moving on.

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Many people know about the fire in Rome in 64 AD. Who got blamed for it?

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Who was initially blamed for it? Nero was correct.

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Nero's response to being blamed for it was to do what? That wasn't his first response.

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His first response, like any good politician, what did he want to do? No, he reminded me of many of the people running for president today.

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He promised the people free stuff, right? He tried to bribe them, in other words.

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That didn't work. They were still blaming Nero. And that's when he resorted to blame the

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Christians. Why the Christians? Because they were a new religious group who really didn't fit in at all.

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And here's the thing, because it was a new religion, they had no respect, right?

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They were the Rodney Dangerfields of the ancient world. Some of you younger people don't know who he is, look him up on the internet.

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I'll tell you, I get no respect. Okay. You're always looking for a scapegoat, especially if you're a politician.

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It took the focus off Nero. Actually, what he did was, when the fire started, he organized a response, a firefighting effort and everything, and then he went to the bribes and then blaming the

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Christians. But the Christians were perfect targets because nobody respected them.

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They made perfect targets for persecution and taking the blame. Let's know what happened to them.

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This is what Nero did to them. Some were dressed in furs, animal furs, and killed by dogs.

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Others were crucified or burned alive in the light or to light the night, human torches.

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They were entertainment. They were treated as subhuman, not important at all.

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Now, historically, do we know how Peter died? The apostle Peter.

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What's that? See, Pastor Bob is gonna save you all here.

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He says, there's a tradition. What's the difference between tradition and we know? Yeah, it's not in the

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Bible, and really, we don't have any good historian. We have, in fact, I was reading, I'm trying to remember, there's one of these apocryphal books, not really even apocryphal.

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I'm sure it's a Gnostic thing. It's called like the Testimony of Peter or something like that.

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And in it, Peter's in Jerusalem and he's flying around Jerusalem doing battle with somebody else.

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And in the book, he eventually winds up in Rome for some reason, and he winds up being crucified upside down.

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So that is really the best indication we have of what we believe happened to him.

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But we don't ultimately know. Here's what we do know. Okay, I'll say it, and then you tell me how

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I know. Jesus gives it away. Peter died as a martyr.

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Okay, let's look at John 21, verse 18. John 21, verse 18.

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Truly, truly, I say to you, this is Jesus talking to Peter, and he says, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted.

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But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.

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Hmm. I mean, this is a clear indication, I think, that he was probably crucified.

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And Jesus is telling him, this is how you're gonna die. Paul was put to death in Rome, and we don't know exactly how, but it's very likely that he was killed by the sword because he was a

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Roman citizen and crucifixion was so awful, it was against the law to crucify a

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Roman citizen. So this is the popularity of the

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Christians. But again, it's not really Nero's fault that the Christians are not unpopular.

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To the Romans, it was a bizarre religion because Christians worshiped one

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God. And to the polytheists of Rome, that just sounded bizarre. They worshiped a whole bunch of gods.

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In fact, they might say that they, or you might say that they hedged their bets by worshiping all these other gods.

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They even had, as in Acts 17 in Athens, same kind of idea when they had these statues to unknown gods, why would they do that?

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Because they didn't want to miss a god. And it's odd to us to think about it this way, but Romans considered it their patriotic duty to worship all these gods.

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Why do you suppose that would be true? Why would it be a patriotic duty?

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Sharon. Okay, no separation of church and state, Charlie.

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Okay, you cared about the state of the nation, right? Famine, the strength of the

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Roman empire and everything else because peace meant prosperity, right? Good.

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There's one other thing that we're sort of, we haven't nailed yet. But part of it will be remembered as soon as I say, yep, go ahead.

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There you go. They saw the Caesars as God, right? But not just the living

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Caesar, not just the emperor, but all those who were already dead. That's kind of weird, right?

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You're gonna worship the dead Caesars, the dead emperors.

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But to a Roman mind, if you weren't worshiping the leader of your nation, if you weren't worshiping all these other gods, then you were risking the good of Rome.

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And the idea of worshiping one God who wasn't even Caesar, well, you were some kind of anti -Roman problem.

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Also the language of Christianity confused the Romans. I found this one funny.

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You ever call anybody, you know, brother Steve, sister Janet, you know, something like that, right?

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You ever done that? Brother, sister, whatever. The Romans heard that.

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And what does that mean to the Roman mind? The only place they were used to hearing people call each other that was it was an

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Egyptian tradition for people who were in odd sexual cults.

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They would call each other brother and sister. So they hear this and they're just like, okay, these people are weird.

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The Christians also spoke of their love feasts. It's referred to in Jude chapter 12 as love feasts or Jude verse 12.

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If you find Jude chapter 12, tear it up. Love feasts, which we would call communion, right?

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But what would they hear when they talked about these love feasts? They would talk about the body and blood of Jesus being consumed, right?

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So they would hear these things. They'd go, what kind of love feast is that? So there were the language problems, the way people talked.

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Also Christians did not conform to the culture. Let's look at Galatians 3 .28. And this still cuts against the culture today.

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There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

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Everybody, in other words, everybody is equal at the foot of the cross. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, black or white, slave, free,

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Jew or Gentile, whatever, female, male. But Romans hear that kind of teaching and what are they thinking?

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This goes against all our social norms. Slaves were not permitted to inherit property.

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Slaves were not equal. Slaves were nothing. Women, second -class citizens, you could treat them as you pleased.

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So this idea of equality was not well -received. How about this one?

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Talk about unwanted children as people do these days.

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Well, in those days, it wasn't a woman's choice. It was father's choice.

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If a Roman father did not want his newborn son or daughter, then he would take that baby out to the field and just leave it there to die.

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That was acceptable. And any self -respecting Roman would see that baby in the field and go rejected, just walk right on by.

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The Christians would see that baby and say, I'm gonna adopt that baby.

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The Christians welcomed slaves. They welcomed women. They adopted the unwanted babies.

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The Christians were a problem. They were unpatriotic.

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Some might even say seditious. They had these bizarre terms that made them sound almost vampirish and weird sexually.

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They did not conform to, I mean, if you listen to them, they were cannibals.

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The body and blood of Jesus. Nobody could go to, you know, like we'll have unbelievers probably here today.

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Well, in those days, unbelievers could not attend a worship service.

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Why not? The reason, not because they were,

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I heard that and it's a good guess that they were afraid of getting turned in, but the problem was,

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I don't know if it's a problem, but they had such a high view of the Lord's table. They wanted to guard it so much that they didn't let anybody in because they didn't want anybody to partake of the

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Lord's table in an unworthy way and thus condemn themselves. So they didn't let unbelievers in.

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And it's interesting because Romans viewed the, and they would, and we'll get to this next week.

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They would even view the Christians as, because they refused to worship the emperor, the

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Caesar, they would call them atheists. If you're not willing to worship the one who is obviously

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God, Caesar, then you must be an atheist. So that was one of the charges that would come up over and over against them.

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And again, as I said, Christianity was new. So you say, well, how did

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Judaism, how did it survive? Because Romans, even though they didn't like the

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Jews and they didn't like their customs and everything else, they had some respect for Judaism because it was ancient.

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Christianity in their mind was the Johnny come lately religion. It was not to be respected.

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Of course, Christians could come back and say, well, wait a minute, John 8, 58,

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Jesus said, I am. And what he meant by that, that didn't pass muster with these folks. To the

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Romans, Christianity was the religion of the month, was here today, it'll be gone tomorrow.

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Now, in, backing up just a little bit around 50

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AD, give you a little history of what's going on in Jerusalem. 50

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AD, Roman soldiers provoked a riot.

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I won't describe how they did it. Kind of rude that the soldiers provoked this riot and it ended in the deaths of 30 ,000 adult

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Jews. In 64 AD, I mean, the Jews were a constant problem for the

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Roman empire because they kept rebelling, sometimes rightly as we're gonna see here in a moment. And the

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Romans didn't really appreciate it very much. In 64 AD, a new governor was appointed over Judea.

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His name was Florus, Florus and Fauna, you know, he's the flower guy.

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What he did was he stole from the temple. The Jews didn't really very much appreciate that.

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So they complained. His response was to send a large group of soldiers into the marketplace.

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And when the Jews started objecting, they slaughtered those who objected.

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In fact, 3 ,000 were killed. Word gets out, word spreads.

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There's a big Jewish rebellion. Nero doesn't like that very much.

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And he sends one of his best generals Vespasian with 60 ,000 soldiers to put things in order down there in Jerusalem.

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As Vespasian gets near Jerusalem and all the Jews by the way are fleeing before him and they're all going to Jerusalem because they're all in these little scattered cities and everything and they know that a big trouble is coming to Jerusalem, but they're going to be killed if they don't flee.

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So they're all running back to Jerusalem. And as Vespasian gets close to Jerusalem, he gets a note that says,

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Nero just killed himself. Well, in those days, if you were a famous Roman general, that was one of your best ways to become

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Caesar. So he says, hmm, I can either stay here and fight these

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Jews or I could go back to Rome, probably make myself Caesar and we'll worry about these guys later.

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And that's exactly what he did. And he became emperor.

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But he didn't forget about the Jews. No, he did not. In fact, he then sent an army back.

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This would be 70 AD. So it took a few years to get there, but not long, 70 AD. And he sent this general down there and they laid siege to Jerusalem.

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Ultimately it led to the destruction of the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem. And by the time they got done with Jerusalem, how many walls of the temple were left?

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One, the one that's still there today. I don't know if that says something great about the construction of that one wall or what it says, but to this very day, it's still there.

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It also led ultimately after they got done with laying waste to Jerusalem, they went on and they conquered all of Israel and ultimately that led to Masada and the suicide of hundreds of Jews there.

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Okay, we'll stop there and pick it up next week.

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Next week, we'll be talking about Justin Martyr. And we'll be talking about Polly Carp.

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We have a number of them here. So anyway, let's close in prayer.

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Our Father, we just thank you for your providential hand in protecting your people, protecting the truth.

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I mean, the people get persecuted, they're even put to death, but the truth continues to spread.

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Your spirit continues to convict and to convert and to grant new life to people who previously had opposed the gospel.

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You open their eyes, even in the midst of knowing that as soon as they became

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Christians, they would become objects of ridicule and really hatred. And yet you save people in spite of the cultural pressure.

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Father, even today would you do that? Knowing the low regard that the world has for Christians who actually believe the

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Bible, who believe this nearly 2000 year old document in its latter stages.

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Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the surety of it. Please, Father, by your spirit, enable us to guard the trust, to keep the faith, to guard it from error, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.