06 - Clement of Rome Part 1

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right. If you're visiting with us this morning, we have begun a series on church history.

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And we had done this back in the 90s, back when technology isn't the way it is now.

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The funny thing is, though, our microphone worked in the 90s and not so much the moment. But we're using other technology to get things recorded, and we will press forward.

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We have certainly a much more interesting audience listening to us now via sermon audio than we did in those days.

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Now, last week, I introduced you to the next section of what we'll be looking at, and that is the apostolic fathers.

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We're talking about the writings of individuals who live in the time period where they could have known or been in the generation of people who knew the apostles.

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By the way, I picked up some papyri.

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This is modern papyri, but it's still pretty much what we would have had.

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We were talking about papyrus manuscripts. We were talking about how, I'll just many of those early documents,

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New Testament manuscripts, as well as, obviously, the writings of some of the early church fathers would have been written probably on a material similar to this.

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As you can see, you take the leaves of the papyrus plant. You put them at 90 -degree angles to one another.

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You press them together, and it makes a fairly smooth surface for writing.

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And when we look at the papyri that we have of the New Testament, like P52, P66, P45, so on and so forth, you can see, take that piece of papyrus and age it 1 ,800 years.

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And it's going to be a little bit on the brittle side. And you can see why they're damaged the way they are.

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But a lot of those early writings would have been written on something like that. So I thought I'd send that around so you could see what the papyrus looks like.

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So anyways, the early writers, obviously, we do not have everything that early

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Christians wrote. And we need to keep something in mind.

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There is very, very often, I think, a bad misunderstanding on the part of people that we pass along from generation to generation.

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And that is, well, we would expect the apostolic fathers to have the best theology, because they were right after the apostles.

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And obviously, the church would have just been in perfect shape then.

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Well, if that were the case, then how come there's so much controversy in the New Testament itself?

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Why are there false teachers, false prophets, schisms, all sorts of things that are recorded for us in the pages of the

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New Testament itself? Not only that, but when you say you knew one of the apostles,

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I've found it sort of funny, especially over the past 10 years or so.

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I've run into these folks, and the internet makes this a lot worse, who seem to think that they're good buds with me.

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And it's because they have a selfie with me after I spoke at a church someplace.

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And that just makes us good buds. And they know everything there is to know about me.

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They know my teaching inside and out and the whole nine yards, because they have a selfie with me. Or there are people with whom

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I exchanged a couple emails. And because of that, they've debated me, because we exchanged emails or some posts on Facebook.

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And that's somehow a debate. Well, some of that may be due to the internet, but a lot of it is just simply human nature.

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And in light of that, when people would make claims, there are a lot of people who made claims to have known the apostles or known the apostles' teachings or been taught by the apostles.

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Well, if you heard one apostle preach one sermon, does that guarantee that you're going to have some kind of perfect theology and understanding?

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Of course not. That sermon could only have been on a limited number of topics.

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And I can guarantee you, I do a lot of speaking around the world.

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And I'll have people come up to me after I've spoken sometime, and they'll sort of comment on what

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I just said. And it's probably a character flaw of mine or something, but it's sort of hard for me to control my facial features at times, because I want to go, were you attending the talk

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I just did, or is there somebody doing something down the hall? Because I don't have a clue where you just got what you think

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I said. And I try not to say it that way, but my face sort of screams it out loud sometimes.

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Because what someone hears you say is so often so deeply filtered through pre -existing traditions they have and things like that, that it comes out and you're left going, no, that's not what

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I meant. No, not even close. Sorry. Right? So you have all sorts of folks back then that might make the claim.

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And then if they get themselves some followers, then those followers will be going, ah, well, we got this from the apostle

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Peter, because our founder said x, y, and z, and he was taught by Peter, which means he heard

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Peter give a sermon once. So keep that type of thing in mind.

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We don't have everything that was written. And some of the things that we'll look at briefly, like the

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Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, may have been popular in a particular area, but they're very, very sub -biblical.

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And part of the reason for this is that as late as into the next century, you're going to have people, the second century, the 150s, 160s, you're going to have people who only have a portion of the

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New Testament. So what if you had the Gospels, but you had only heard rumors of and summaries of the rest of the

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New Testament? How balanced are you necessarily going to be, given your background, traditions, what your former religious beliefs were?

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So the point is that we get the idea, and some people have the idea, that, well, those first couple of generations, they must have.

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But it really ignores the reality that it took time, after the apostles are driven out in other parts of the world.

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John might write a book in Ephesus, but how long is it going to take till that becomes popular in Egypt or in France?

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But doll. Modern day France. It's not like today, where something happens, and we know about it instantly, via social media and other things like that.

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That is an extremely new situation. And unfortunately, a lot of people, especially, again,

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I pick on the millennials, but you're very pickable. A lot of the millennials struggle to think in a meaningfully historical fashion, because they're almost never challenged to think about history anyways.

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History just becomes a grab bag that you look for stuff that will help you to support your particular political views, or worldview, or whatever else it is, rather than actually trying to enter into what life would have been like then, and how people viewed the world, and why they said the things they said, and wisdom that we might actually gain from people who are not so ridiculously distracted by stuff as we are, that actually had an attention span beyond just a few seconds.

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And I keep remembering my time on CNN last year, and talking with the producer, and realizing they really do plan things for an attention span of 15 seconds.

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When you think about that, it says a lot. It says a lot about the current level of discourse in our world.

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I'm reminded of what Doug Wilson said to this one lady, a protester, if you've ever seen the video of this, when he was speaking on the subject of homosexuality at a university.

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And she'd never let him get past the middle of the second sentence. And eventually, he said, young lady, you need to understand.

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Sometimes I have thoughts that take more than two sentences to express. And there was something that was meant to be communicated there.

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Missed it, just right over the top. But he's right. And people struggle with that.

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Now, when we look at the Apostolic Fathers, what is the first writing we have from a

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Christian that is not in the

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New Testament? Well, you're not going to be overly shocked to discover that there is dispute about this, mainly because most of your writings those days, now business documents, things like that, would be dated.

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And you can normally figure out, even if it's to such and such a year of such and such a person's reign, you can normally figure out what that is.

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But like an epistle that you're writing to a church or something is generally not going to have 15

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April AD 57 on it or something like that.

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So when we look at probably the two most likely documents that would qualify in the earliest outside the

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New Testament would be, well, this poor thing has seen better days, the

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Didache. And we'll just call it Clement of Rome.

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That is, as we will see, an inappropriate description that you will not find anywhere in the epistle itself.

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But we'll talk about that in a moment. Probably these two can be appropriately dated to the very last years of the first century, so the mid to late 90s.

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Some people put the Didache as early as the 80s or as late as the 120s.

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There's no date on it, so we simply don't know.

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But these are probably the two earliest extra canonical.

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Now, when we say extra canonical, that doesn't mean that there weren't people. For example, we'll see the

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Shepherd of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas. There were limited number of people, primarily in geographical areas, that actually thought they were canonical for a period of time.

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But when we're talking about extra canonical, we're meaning, looking back with the canon of scripture as we have today, these are not in the canon of scripture.

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And which were the earliest ones? And probably these two. Today, we're going to look at Clement of Rome, then we'll look at the

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Didache. And by the way, as I mentioned before, these books are widely available.

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It's always funny to see people online or people on the internet trying to call these the lost books of the

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Bible and things that the church are hiding from us. And I mentioned to you the debate that we had down in South Africa.

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And one of the Muslims played a clip from the BBC about the Didache and how it's this secret thing.

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And they've got spooky music in the background. And it doesn't have the deity of Christ in it.

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And oh, just blowing this thing up. I've been reading the portions of Didache to my students as I started teaching church history in 1990.

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It was hard for me, literally, to keep from laughing at how absurd this was.

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But there are certain people that the BBC loves that, as long as it's anti -Christian, it'll get on there.

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And so this stuff is generally available. If you go to ccel .org, ccel .org,

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that's a good website that has all sorts of freebie books in church history.

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They'll obviously be translations that are 100 some odd years old, because it's free. But ccel .org

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is one place you can go. Here's a paperback by Michael Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, Greek Texts and English Translations.

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So here's The Apostolic Fathers. It's about twice as big as it needs to be, because it has Greek and English in it.

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But that's available to you in printed form. All this stuff is available if you've got Logos, BibleWorks, PC Study, Bible, Olive Tree, Accordance, all that stuff.

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These things are available. I have all these on my phone, my iPad, all that kind of stuff. But what

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I don't have, and why I had to go by the office this morning to pick up my paper edition, I have all this on my iPad.

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But one of the most enjoyable classes I ever got to teach at Golden Gate years and years ago was in the late 90s, or early 2000s.

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I forget now which one it was. But anyway, I taught a class called Development of Patristic Theology. And basically, a bunch of guys

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I had taught Greek to earlier, we sat around with Clement, and the

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Didache, and Ignatius, and translated and talked about the apostolic period and the development of theology and stuff like.

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It was a blast. We even had one class on a cruise, which was really fun.

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Sit around after a nice huge meal and talk theology.

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That was a lot of fun. And obviously, I marked a lot of stuff back then.

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And so that's why I went and got the paper edition, so that I could get to my markings in the text that I used, which was the older text.

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This is sort of what's been available for a long time. This is Lightfoot and Harmer's edition of the

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Apostolic Fathers. And it's still available, too. And so you've got the

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Martyrdom of Polycarp and all sorts of other neat stuff in here. And once we had done with Clement and the

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Didache, we'll look at Ignatius. I'll read you the Martyrdom of Ignatius and stuff like that.

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I think it's important that you're familiar with these things. Haven't just heard about them, but actually get a chance to read them and know something about them.

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I think it helps out a lot. One of the things you'll note, now,

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Clement. Clement of Rome, well, yeah, that's the traditional authorship.

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But we don't know who wrote it. If it was Clement, and this is extremely important, this is one point where sometimes people tune out.

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But tune in here for a second. This is a letter from the church at Rome, the church at Corinth, rebuking them for having driven their elders out.

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There was a church split. And enough people were involved in it that they were able to remove the properly instituted leadership of the church.

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Now, what's important to recognize is the letter is very clear. It was elders, not a bishop, elders.

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Now, why is that significant? Well, hopefully, it's obvious why that's significant.

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It's significant because we have to ask ourselves the question, what did the church look like during a period of time where the

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Apostle John may still have been alive or had only recently passed? Was the church looking to the successors of Peter to lead the church?

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And the fact of the matter is there's not a scintilla of evidence that's the case. This is one of the great failures of the modern

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Roman Catholic historical effort to substantiate the papacy. Some of you have heard of a man by the name of Cardinal Newman.

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He was an Anglican that converted to Roman Catholicism and came up with what's called the development hypothesis that divine truth is like the acorn to the oak tree.

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It's given in a small form. It develops over time. And this is his way of getting around the fact that the early church did not look like modern

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Roman Catholicism. There was no pope. There were no cardinals. There were no seven sacraments, et cetera, et cetera.

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But he is the one who is responsible for a phrase that you hear over and over today.

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In fact, it was repeated a number of times in a book called Evangelical Exodus, which was the stories of nine people who were graduates and some had taught on the staff of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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And if you're familiar with Southern Evangelical Seminary, it was founded by Norman Geisler. And that they are famous for being, well, the patron saint is

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Thomas Aquinas. They are wedded to Thomas Aquinas.

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And the problem is Thomas Aquinas was a full -blown Roman Catholic. And they're into him for philosophical reasons, but it's sort of hard to separate the philosophy and the theology.

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They're very anti -reform. They're against the Reformation. So it's not overly shocking that 24 people, graduates and staff people of that church, of that seminary, have, since its founding, become

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Roman Catholics. It's just sort of like, well, duh. But they can't see the duh part for some reason.

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And so some of these people got together and wrote a book about why they became Roman Catholics and how SES was a major part of this.

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Well, one of the primary issues, of course, has to do with the authority of the

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Roman bishop. And the phrase that appeared a bunch of times in that book, and it comes from John Henry Cardinal Newman, was, to go deep into history is to cease to be

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Protestant. To go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant. Now, what has always made me chuckle about that is that John Henry Cardinal Newman lived in the years right before 1870.

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Anybody know what happened in 1870? Yes, sir, you can say it louder than that if you'd like.

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First Vatican Council takes place in 1870. What's defined in the First Vatican Council? Papal infallibility.

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In the years before that council, there was great debate on the subject.

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And John Henry Cardinal Newman was one of the primary people that argued against the idea of papal infallibility because he knew that, historically speaking, it was absurd to assert that this was the faith of the ancient church.

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Nobody at the Council of Nicaea, the first great ecumenical council, had any inkling of the idea that all they needed to do was just ask the bishop of Rome.

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And since he's the infallible head of the church, he could have defined all this stuff for us. Why bother with all these councils then?

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I don't get it. Nobody back then had any idea of this. And so it's funny that these converts would be quoting

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John Henry Cardinal Newman because Newman argues against it. Then when it's defined, all of a sudden he shuts up.

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So I guess to go deep into history is to shut up once Rome tells you to, which is sort of not the same thing that they're trying to communicate with their particular apologetic that they're using today.

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Well, why is this relevant to our studies? Well, obviously, some

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Roman Catholics would say, well, here, in the first writing outside the

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New Testament, the church at Rome is showing its authority. The bishop of the Church of Rome, Clement, is writing the

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Corinthians and saying, you put those people back. We're in charge. And there are lots of folks, lots of young hotheads at the

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University of Steubenville and places like that that will tell you that's exactly what this epistle is all about.

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Well, that's not what the epistle is all about. If someone tells you that, they're demonstrating they actually haven't read it.

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It never names the author. And it recognizes that the church at Corinth had a different form of church government than one bishop over the church.

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It had a plurality of elders, because it always refers to elders in plural. What's even more important is that all the evidence points out, and keep this in mind if you're taking notes, that up to 140 or 150

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AD, the church at Rome likewise had a plurality of elders.

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And did not have but one bishop. Now, that's extremely important, because if Rome was allegedly founded by Peter, and there's no evidence of that, there's strong evidence against it.

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But even if you take that, how could Peter's successors not have the idea that they were the head of the church if that's what

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Peter's intention was? But there was no monarchical episcopate. Monarch, one, monarchical episcopate.

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One bishop ruling over a church. There was no monarchical episcopate until the middle of the second century in Rome.

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That is an established fact across denominational lines.

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In other words, there are many Roman Catholic historians who recognize that that is the case as well.

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And so here you have the church at Rome remonstrating with the church at Corinth. And isn't it interesting?

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Corinth had problems in the mid-'50s. 40 years later, they've still got problems.

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They've still got problems. But it's not the bishop of Rome, because there is no one bishop of Rome.

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It is the church at Rome writing to the church at Corinth saying, you all need to be at peace.

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And the church at Rome isn't saying, or we're going to kick you all out, or we have the authority to do this, or anything else like that.

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They are equals writing to each other. And on the basis of biblical truth and a lot of Old Testament citations about peace and harmony and things like that, the one is remonstrating with the other saying, what you've done is wrong.

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This isn't the pope saying, I will excommunicate you unless you do this. It's not what's going on.

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It's not what's going on. In fact, this is the type of thing that gives us an insight into that early period that's extremely important to be able to understand.

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So as I said, name, if it was Clement, he may have just simply been the secretary for the elders.

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We don't know. But it's the church at Rome toward the end of the first century writing to the church at Corinth, which has been racked by division and saying, you need to restore those who are your proper elders.

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What you're doing is wrong. There's rebellion going on there. Not rebellion against Rome, rebellion against the

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God -ordained leadership that was in your church in the first place. So that's what brings that particular thing apart.

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Now, the next thing to know, I'm going to read you a number of portions. What strikes me is the number of times that language of election occurs in this epistle.

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My Arminian friends love to say, well, the early church fathers were opposed.

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It wasn't until Augustine. I'm like, have you ever read Diognetius? Have you ever read Clement? Where are you getting this from?

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A lot of time, it's from reading secondary sources rather than reading the actual sources themselves. So it starts off.

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The church of God, which sojourneth in Rome, to the church of God, which sojourneth in Corinth. Notice there's equality there.

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To them which are called and sanctified by the will of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, grace to and peace from almighty God through Jesus Christ be multiplied.

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By reason of the sudden repeated calamities and reverses which are befalling us, brethren. Which seemingly was in reference to the persecution against the

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Christians in Rome around 95 AD. The only other earlier time that it would have been something like this was under Nero, and that's way too early.

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We consider that we have been somewhat tardy in giving heed to the matters of dispute that have arisen among you, dearly beloved, and to the detestable and unholy sedition.

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So alien and strange to the elect of God, which a few headstrong and self -willed persons have kindled to such a pitch of madness that your name, once revered and renowned and lovely in the sight of all men, has been greatly reviled.

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For who that had sojourned among you did not approve your most virtuous and steadfast faith?

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Who did not admire your sober and forbearing piety in Christ? Who did not publish abroad your magnificent disposition of hospitality?

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Who did not congratulate you on your perfect and sound knowledge, et cetera, et cetera? And then it goes on to speak of the problem.

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But then in section two, you had conflict day and night for all the brotherhood.

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Listen to this. That the number of his elect might be saved with fearfulness and intentness of mind.

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Now I don't know about you, but I've listened to a lot of Arminian sermons, and that ain't how they talk.

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I've never heard an Arminian going, that the number of his elect might be saved. Now I hear people trying to imitate

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Al Martin or Charles Haddon Spurgeon, use that type of language. But I don't hear my

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Arminian friends talking about that the number of his elect might be saved. That's number two. Now, then we also get some insights.

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I'm going to note a number of others. But we also get some insights into some controversies that we have.

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Because you've heard the story. You've heard the phrase many times before. People say, well, according to tradition, such and such happened.

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You ever wonder where that tradition comes from? Well, it comes from these early writings. And here, let us set before our eyes the good apostles.

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There is Peter, who by reason of unrighteous jealousy endured not one nor two, but many labors.

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And thus, having borne his testimony, went to his appointed place of glory. Now, why do

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I mention that? Because there's no reference to it having happened in Rome. You would think that later on, it became very important, make the connection, his authority, so on and so forth.

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You would think that if that was the mindset of the Church of Rome at this point, there would just be this huge emphasis upon it.

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Nothing. Then, check this out. By reason of jealousy and strife, Paul, by his example, pointed out the prize of patient endurance.

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After that, he had been seven times in bonds. I can't count seven times in the

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New Testament, can you? Seven times in bonds, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, had preached in the

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East and in the West. He won the noble renown, which was the reward of his faith, having taught righteousness unto the whole world, and having reached the farthest bounds of the

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West. And when he had borne his testimony before the rulers, so he departed from the world and went unto the holy place, having been found a noble pattern of patient endurance.

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So what's the indication from this? Very clearly, only about three decades later, maybe four at most, the idea is not that Paul died there in Rome at that time, but that he was released, and he did get to go to Spain.

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That would be the farthest bounds of the West. And evidently, had more run -ins with the empire, seven times in bonds, before he met his death.

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So does that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that that's what happened? No, but it is significant that in some of the very earliest sources of what we call the tradition of what happened to the apostles, the idea was that Paul was released, and that he did go to the

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West, and it had been his intention to do so, and that he preached all the way into Spain and places like that.

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Does that prove it? No, but it's interesting to see the language that was used to actually express that.

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The very next sentence is, under these men of holy lives was gathered a vast multitude of the elect, who through many indignities and tortures, being the victims of jealousy, set a brave example among ourselves.

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This term, elect, keeps popping up all over the place for some reason. Let us fix our eyes, this is section seven, let us fix our eyes on the blood of Christ and understand how precious it is unto his father, because being shed for our salvation, it won for the whole world the grace of repentance.

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Now, does that give us an insight into at least some concept of the intention and mechanism of the atonement?

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One of the things we're going to discover, we have to be careful that we don't assume that the things that are most important to us were necessarily the things that were most important in every other generation in the church.

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So the great conflicts back then, first of all, they lasted much longer.

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Communication was much more slow. Today, someone can publish something.

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I mean, there's a big controversy going on right now. The funny thing is, we're recording this, and I'll bet 20 years from now, this controversy will not be going on.

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But in the ancient church, 20 years would be a short period of time. The difference being, today, there's a controversy going on.

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It's a Trinitarian controversy. I'm not sure if any of you have ever heard of it. It's been brewing for a while, but it's blown up just over the past month or so.

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And it has to do with the ESS or EFS, Eternal Functional Subordinationism or Eternal Submission of the

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Son. And there are certain theologians, Bruce Ware, Wayne Grudem, who are teaching that in the

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Godhead, not in what's called the economic trinity, which is how Father, Son, and Spirit work to bring about salvation and taking different roles, but actually, in their relationship to one another before creation and everything else, that there is an essential submission or subordination of the

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Son to the Father, a willing submission. And this has become very important, and because they're both very much involved in the defense of complementarianism over against egalitarianism.

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And so what they're saying is the relationship of Father and Son becomes a paradigm for the relationship of man and woman.

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And it has, like I said, been bubbling for quite some time. I read an excellent article yesterday on my way back from Tucson.

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Well, please don't worry. That means I listened to it. When I say read, I can just see some of you sitting there.

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I saw you on the road going down I -10 yesterday. Sure. From a

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Reformed Baptist perspective on this subject, and what does our confession say?

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And it was very, very well done. But it's obviously a rather complicated subject.

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But the point is, since we have the internet, Carl Truman at Westminster Seminary posts something.

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Within three days, Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware have posted something. And now Carl Truman has posted back.

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In the ancient days, it would take Carl Truman a month to write the first thing.

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And then it would take six months for it to travel around. And then another month to be responded to, and six months for it to get back to Carl Truman.

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And so at the very least, people did not expect rapid development in controversy.

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They expected it to be something that would be drawn out, well thought out.

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And I'm not really certain that the internet has helped much. Because I don't think that we think any deeper or faster than we did in the past.

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Maybe a whole lot less, in reality. And it makes me wonder if the level of dialogue as a result is significantly less deep than it was in the ancient world.

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And obviously, a lot more people are involved in the conversation now. And we've been taught that's a good thing.

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Not necessarily. I'm going to prove just how unloving and non -PC

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I am. But not everyone's opinions and things of religion are equal. Now, if you think that's a terrible, horrible thing to say, you've been deeply influenced by the spirit of this age.

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There is not a single person who signed their name to the London Baptist Confession of Faith that would disagree with what

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I just said. Not one. And not one of them would have understood why it's even a disputable issue. Why do

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I say that? Well, we all recognize not everyone's opinions, when it comes to medicine, are equal to everybody else's.

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And not everyone's opinions, when it comes to car repair, are equal to everyone else's.

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But when it comes to religion, we've been taught, everyone's opinions are equal. Well, no, they're not. No, they're not.

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If you've never read the entirety of the Bible, your opinion about the Bible is not nearly as good as someone who spent their entire life studying it.

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I'm sorry. That's just a fact. And so the internet opens up the idea that as long as you've got a computer, a keyboard, and an internet connection, somehow you get to be in on the conversation.

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Well, the reality is that it just becomes noise and makes it all the more difficult to find the real thoughtful commentary, let alone the fact that a lot of people are sitting around trying to figure out how to say something extremely witty about the subject in 140 characters.

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And when it comes to the subject of the internal relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit in eternity past, 140 characters is not enough.

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But in our day, for a lot of people, they'll make decisions based upon that. It's tragedy. It really is.

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It's just amazing. I think. What's the question?

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Explain the 140 characters. What is a character? A character is a letter. So 140 letters.

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That's Twitter. So when you tweet, you only have 140 characters. Unless you cheat.

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I cheat all the time. But that's the whole idea. Well, this thing's called

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TweeShort, So you can write forever, and just one little thing shows up. You have to click on a link and read it that way.

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So I do that all the time. So anyway, all of that to say that I don't know that the issue that is currently at controversy, there's a war going on amongst some very big names,

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I don't know that the result of it is necessarily going to be overly helpful for a long period of time because of the level and the speed at which it is being dealt with.

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That's not how things were done back then. I mean, this letter had to be written, and then there wasn't any fax machine.

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It took time to get to Corinth. It had to be read in Corinth. There was time delay involved.

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Sometimes that can actually help out. It sort of lessens the temperature of the conversation.

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It might actually help some. So I mention that in passing. All of that to say that I read because being shed for our salvation and one for the whole world, the grace of repentance.

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That can be read a number of different ways. The problem is this. The first full book written on the subject of the atonement comes after the middle of the fourth century.

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So if the New Testament is completed by the end of the 1st, you're talking 250 years before the first full work on the atonement is published.

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In the meantime, some people that we can learn a fair amount from in other areas hold the theories of the atonement that you and I would look at and go, what were you thinking?

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And it's real easy for us. It's something that's really easy to get into.

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Well, if you're wrong about that, how can you be right about anything else? Not realizing that, again, you're staying on the shoulders of giants.

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You get to read, Owen. You get to read this stream of biblical theology and exegesis down through history.

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And even if you don't read it, you're getting taught by people who did read it. They didn't have that.

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They didn't have that. And so you've got to be really careful as to how quick you are with your judgment on someone who did not have what you have, even if you don't realize that you have been functioning on the basis of it all along.

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I think it's one of the real tragedies of the historically disconnected modern man is you can control him so easily by playing with his paradigms and his presuppositions.

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And because he doesn't know history, he doesn't even realize that you're doing it. To be ignorant of history is to be easily controlled.

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To think emotionally is to be easily controlled, too. That's another issue. Anyhow, check this out.

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At the end of section 8, we've only got a couple of minutes here, the end of section 8, we aren't going very fast, are we?

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Well, seeing then, listen to this, seeing then that he desireth all his beloved to be partakers of repentance, he confirmed it by an act of his almighty will.

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That sounds like my understanding of 2 Peter 3 .9. Seeing then that he desireth all his beloved to be partakers of repentance, he confirmed it by an act of his almighty will.

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Interesting stuff that we find here. One more real quickly here, section 16.

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I was listening to a friend of mine. There's one of the staff down at Roosevelt Community Church on Roosevelt, about Central Avenue, Volcad Malone, has been studying black

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Hebrew Israelism. Wild, wild, wild stuff, really wild stuff.

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And he was on one of their programs. He didn't get to say much, but he was on one of their programs. And this elder for this movement said all sorts of just wild stuff that's completely untrue, but obviously, he didn't know that.

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But one of the things that he said was, well, first of all, he said, for example, the term deity is never used of Jesus in the

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Bible. And I'm sitting there going, Colossians 2 .9, for in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.

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But then he said that no one believed in this stuff until the Council of Nicaea in 325.

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I hope you're taking notes as to how many times, especially we get to Ignatius, we're going to see people who believe in the deity of Christ long before the

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Council of Nicaea in 325. That's the Dan Brown silliness that makes people money, but it's just ridiculous.

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Here is section 16, first century. For Christ is with them that are lowly of mind, not with them that exalt themselves over the flock.

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The scepter of the majesty of God, even our Lord Jesus Christ, came not in the pomp of arrogance or pride, though he might have done so, but in lowliness of mind, according as the

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Holy Spirit spake concerning him. Now, that phrase, of God, even our

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Lord Jesus Christ, could be understood as identifying Jesus as God, or it could be understood as identifying him as the scepter of the majesty of God.

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And if that's the case, what do you have here? Listen to it again. The scepter of the majesty of God, even our

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Lord Jesus Christ, came not in pomp of arrogance or pride, though he might have done so, but in lowliness of mind, according as the

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Holy Spirit spake concerning him. Then you have a quotation from the Old Testament. So if you do have

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God, Jesus Christ, the scepter of his majesty, speaking by the Holy Spirit, what do you have?

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Trinitarian passage. The three associated, just as you have it 70 times in the

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New Testament, here you have it in the very words of the writer to the

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Corinthians, naturally flowing from the Christian experience of understanding the doctrine of the

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Trinity. So I'm going to put a marker or something there so that I remember where we are.

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And well, thank you, sir. We'll pick up at that.

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Oops. Y 'all saw that happen, didn't you? OK, there we go. And we are right here.

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All right. OK, well, there you go.

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I think that's some pretty fascinating stuff personally. And hopefully it's helpful to you as well. Let's close our time.

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Heavenly Father, we do thank you that you have been working with your church for all these years. And we ask that you would continue that process even today through your word and your spirit, conforming us to the image of your son as we go into worship.