God's Sovereignty In Church History (part 1)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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when we think of the history of the church you know it's easier for us to think of it in the context of a local church you know some of you have been with Bethlehem Bible Church many years and you know how

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BBC has come progress through time good times bad times actually we heard Fred Thiebaud's testimony in the men's breakfast and it was very insightful to understand how

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BBC was formed and how some of the pastors served and changed and where we are right now and yesterday one of you gave me some insight into the churches in West Boylston and how many of you know that the reservoir here has churches sunk underneath?

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More than I did and do you know how many churches are there underneath the water?

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Two or three? I did a little internet search and I got a little helpful book from Mrs.

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Joyce and it says there are four churches that were there. They were raised before they went down. The old stone church was spared but it couldn't be used so all the things from there were removed.

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Now if you look at the history of the church we find that there are churches that went underwater you know maybe because there are no more people attending.

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If you look at Europe there are a lot of such buildings which are empty because people no longer want to worship and we also see other churches which went down spiritually you know they went declined morally maybe the leadership you know sinned badly and then the whole group disbanded or they left theologically the doctrines that identified them as Christians and they're no longer churches now.

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So today we're not going to be looking at any particular local church but rather at the universal church how is it that church from the

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New Testament times right up until, we're going to go only up until the Reformation and what happened in the church and how we can look at God's sovereignty through these times and how even in the darkest periods

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God was still active and alive. One of the things we see in the Bible is that it declares

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God's hand among his people which is recorded in history in the

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Bible. So when we see his dealings with Israel in the Old Testament especially as you look at the historic history books of the

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Bible you see how God's people sinned over and over again but God was faithful and he did work with them and had a remnant and he brought them through to accomplish his purposes we see the same again with the church especially in the

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New Testament in the book of Acts and how God has this small group of people and they go out and do his work and some of the references you see there in the first paragraph refer to places where things were recorded in the scriptures whether it was just events but more importantly to show how

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God's hand was in those events in accomplishing what he wanted to be done.

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They were recorded faithfully, they are accurate representation of history they also show

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God's view of his hand with his people. The second section we have here the background of the

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Bible it's important for us to have this in our head while we are looking at the history of the church I'm not going to spend time on this this is more of a reference it's broken down into 12 sections.

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The first nine refer to the Old Testament we have the 10th section which talks about the period between the

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Old and the New Testaments. The 11th is obviously the pinnacle of all history it has to do with Jesus, the whole purpose of which history was pointing to and now we look back on and in 12 we see the early church and how they went out

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Pentecost, the Spirit of God comes on his people. We see Peter and Paul and their ministries and then we end with the

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Apostles whether their missionary work outside or within the local church where they were teaching and that's where the early church ends off in the

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New Testament. And our purpose this morning picking up in section 3 actually let me hold on for a second here.

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Section 2 is your homework so when you go back home you can look at that more closely most of the events and people listed there should be familiar to you and when we in the context of today's

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Sunday school you should be able to apply the same principles in terms of God's sovereignty how did God work all of this out for example the first section that we have creation it's glorious God with his spoken word brings all of creation, the universe into existence and then we have

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Adam and Eve and the fall disaster by any human proportions and through that we see that God was not surprised and I think it's important for us to grasp this because here is the greatest disaster as you can ever think of man created in the image of God and he sins and he breaks what seems like the perfect plan but God was not surprised he had his purpose that was brought out through the fall and likewise through history we see over and over again you know great times bad times but God is in control throughout so we'll now dig into church history my purpose this morning is to show how

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God was sovereign in the history of the church we will see God's continued hand in the Bible when we look at we recognize

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God's hand and we're going to see that hand continue both through good and difficult times with the church in the

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Bible Israel forsook her faithful God and we see that pattern again repeated in the church and what we're going to do is look at some key persons some key events and try to fit this together now before we get into the events of history

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I want to look at two passages here you can turn to your Bibles because the text here is kinda small we're not going to spend too much time on this but I want this to be in your mind while we're going through these events we have a lot of events that we're going to cover so it's good for us to have this recognition of what the church is and where it's going to be before we look at it so the first passage is from Revelation 19 7 -9

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I'm just going to read that out loud let us rejoice and exult and give him glory for the marriage of the

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Lamb has come the lamb here is Jesus Christ and his bride which is the church has made herself ready it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen bright and pure for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints and the angel said to me write this blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb and he said to me these are the true words of God so no matter what your eschatological view is these words are true in the end of history you're going to see the

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Christ and his bride the church and this is the the term here as we look in Ephesians shows the intimate relationship that the church has with its head which is

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Christ and the church is going to be married to the church to Christ in the end and how is this going to happen we see that in Ephesians 5 25 to 27 it's a passage which talks about family the relationship of husband and wife and it shows that this is built on the same kind of relationship that Christ has with this church and which is what we want to look at because Christ is going to accomplish this this

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Revelation 19 passage by his work in the church now it says husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish it's important for us to keep these mind words in our mind especially as you look at the some of the darkest moments that the church goes through because we know

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God is faithful and he brings the church even through those times into purity and one day we will be presented without spot or wrinkle so the history here

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I've broken down into three major periods in terms of time frame roughly 800 to 600 and then we'll be looking at 600 to 1100 and 1100 to 1500 most of the time you're going to spend in the first section because those are some key events there that will help us wrestle with this idea of sovereignty of God.

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The rest of the sections we may skip through or those are just there for your reference and in the end we will look at some applications in terms of what we ought to do based on what we have learned here.

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So beginning with the first section what I have here first is the Apostolic Fathers and here they're called as Apostolic Fathers because these men either knew the apostles themselves or they knew some of the disciples of the apostles so they had very close connection with the

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New Testament times and these are also men who had written down what was going on what they had learned in books which we now have which gives us insight into the early church.

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Some of the men and their writings here are Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp the letter

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Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache which is the teachings initially thought to be the writings of the twelve disciples but really is a collection of teachings put together later and Ignatius and Polycarp I'm sure most of you are familiar with from I think two weeks ago

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Pastor Mike spoke about persecution. Ignatius was one of those men that was on his way to his martyrdom and on the way he was writing letters to the churches and he didn't even want to be rescued out of martyrdom.

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People wanted to get him out of it but he all counted it as a privilege to suffer and die for Christ and Polycarp you would remember is how many of you remember how old

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Polycarp was when he was put to martyrdom? That's right he was 86 years old, a very old man.

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People wanted him to just deny Christ and escape this thing but he said 86 years my

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Lord has been faithful to me why would I deny him now and he went on to his martyrdom and some of these writings give us insight into the early church.

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We find how they worshipped in the church, what their way of Lord's Supper was, what their love feasts were, how they were to treat preachers especially traveling preachers as you can remember these are the times when people were going around to new areas and things like that.

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It gives us an insight into the early church. There are two things, actually three that I want to spend time on here.

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One will be the time of persecution, the second will be the time of heresies and third will be the time of Augustine and everything else we will just kind of skim through.

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I want to spend time on persecution because especially it kind of ties in with what we've learned in church two weeks ago.

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One of the passages that we did here then is 1 Peter 4 and you want to look at this it almost seems like prophecy fulfilled because I think it is in terms of what

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Peter was writing to and how that came about in the early church times. 1

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Peter 4 12 to 14 it says Peter writes, Beloved do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you but rejoice in so far as you share

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Christ's suffering that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

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If you are insulted for the name of Christ you are blessed because the spirit of glory and God and of God rests upon you.

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As you know 1 Peter is written to the church that is spread out already going through persecution and Peter writes to encourage them and then he also writes about what's going to come even more stronger persecutions through which they are to endure and the church which is now going through the persecution has these writings to give them the strength that they need and to have the right attitude of persecution as they go through these tough times.

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On the left hand side here you see three things. The first is a popular antagonism and here if you think of the early church, here's a group of people who come out of the

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Jewish community and they are initially identified with them but then people around them start to realize these guys are even weirder than the

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Jewish people. They have something that's very different and then they have a lot of misunderstanding about this group.

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They say you know these guys are really immoral they call each other brothers and sisters, they have love feasts, they have this holy kiss.

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I'm not sure what's going on. These guys are really off and then they are actually maybe they're cannibals you know they eat the body and blood of the

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Lord. So there's already a sense of unrest around the people that they live in so the

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Christian's neighbors, their co -workers are already suspicious of what's going on with the Christian community and it's not too long before there's physical persecution that breaks out among the

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Christians. The first group is the local persecution primarily this was around Rome.

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We see most of us are familiar with the persecution under Nero. It was extremely brutal, there was a lot of torture, very inhumane.

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Rome burns, Nero needs a scapegoat, Christians are despised, hey they're the ones that you know

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I can put the blame on and escape out of this. Very intense persecution, Peter and Paul believed to have been tortured and killed during this time.

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Then we have Marcus Aurelius you know in the secular world, a philosopher really gifted in a lot of ways but he strategically put to death some of the key people in the church.

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It wasn't as widespread as Nero's time. One of the men who dies here is Justin Martyr and then we have

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Septimus Severinus and again there's another Caesar where there is very intense persecution of the

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Christians again locally in the Roman city. And then we have empire -wide persecutions.

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Now this spreads out into all the empire. Now the Christians, one of the reasons that happens here, there's various reasons as you see each of these persecution happens in pockets of time some of them more extended than others.

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One of the reasons that happens here is the people start to think you know some of the problems that the Roman Empire is going to, maybe it's because of these

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Christians. These guys are actually atheists, they don't have any gods that we worship.

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They don't have, because they cannot conceive a god that is not in the form of an idol. And these also don't pay homage to Caesar the way that the rest of the people do.

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And Marcus Aurelius for example thought you know blessed are the meek. This is what the Christians believe. It's taking away the strength of my empire and I don't like what these people are teaching.

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And if you look at some of the economic problems that Rome was going through they said oh the gods must be angry because this group of Christians are the ones who are bringing this thing upon our nation.

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So they want to get rid of these people and bring back the glory of Rome again. And they do various things.

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One of the things is Caesar worship. We want to show that we are loyal to the king and the king was considered some kind of a demigod and by offering this pinch of salt you are providing homage to him.

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And the Christians knew that this was going to a level that it shouldn't and they couldn't pay the kind of homage that the

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Romans wanted. And that unleashes a lot of persecution. Under Decius it's about two years.

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There's very intense persecution not just in Rome now but throughout the empire. And then we have Valerian which is a little more extended period at a later point in time.

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These are not consecutive Caesars. These are times when things are okay and then again it comes back with fury.

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And then the last one under which we have persecution is under Diocletian. And it's a very extended period of time.

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Very brutal and then what happens is by the time Diocletian's persecution comes even the

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Roman people are tired. What are we doing with these Christians? We are just beating them, beating them. We are sick of all this torture and persecution.

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Even the people are tired of it. But by the time Diocletian ends persecution has come to an end.

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Now if you think about it you know Christians are a very small group of people. You think you know persecution you can wipe them out and they're not that big but God as you know uses this as a diaspora.

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He spreads the people out. The word gets to places it hasn't gone before and the people are faithful in God's power during this time.

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We see God's hand very strongly. He has already equipped them with the word. He has told them these are going to come and he carries them through these times.

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Now, yes Daniel, that's exactly right.

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So Daniel just mentioned about the church in Smyrna and how through persecutions they remain more faithful to the

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Lord that they were called by than when things are smooth and everything is going easy and they tend to forget him.

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That's exactly true and we'll see that how when the persecution stops the early church goes down the chain of the other churches which forget the

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Lord and look at their own things. But even through the persecutions there are some good things that come out and some not so good things.

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If you look at the right side of that section we have some of the results of the church. One thing that happens very early in the church is the role of the bishop changes from the way it is portrayed biblically.

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So in the Bible times bishop Episcopal, he was an elder, he was one of the leaders in the church and then soon after the role changes to what it is now seen in the

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Catholic Church or in some of the other Presbyterian type churches. He is elevated above the role of a pastor and what really happens through the persecution is maybe this illustration will kind of help you get a handle for what goes on and could have gone on in a church during these times.

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So you have a local church, there's persecution. So Caesar sends his troops out and there's police that come into your church in the morning and they set you all up in line and the pastor is the first one in the head of the line and he has to offer this homage to Caesar and he refuses he's put to death right there, gone.

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So the next man on the line is now asked to do the same thing. You consider, should I do this?

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Am I really denying Christ by doing this? So can I just compromise my faith for just a little while and come back to the faith?

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Or no, I want to be strong but I know the consequences. Here this is not like modern day with the insurance for your family and everybody taken care of.

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Your wife is going to be on the streets, your children won't have food. This is a society where the woman couldn't really provide for a family as well either.

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So you it's not just your life but your whole family that you're thinking of here. So these have tremendous consequences when you do this particular act.

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Some men deny their faith not necessarily because that they deny

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Christ in their hearts but they just don't want to take the consequences. Some men say, no that's okay,

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I know this is what I ought to do. They go there some of them are put to death, some of them are imprisoned and let go maybe later on.

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And then others say, oh this religion is not for me and I don't want to get killed. They are those who truly deny

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Christ, traitors who then say, okay you know here's how I can curry favor with the Empire. I'll go tell where all the churches are and I'll find the

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Bibles and burn them in front so I'm looking good before the Romans. So those are not

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Christians who are actually separated during these times. But what does happen is in many of these churches you no longer have pastors and what do you look for?

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Leadership. So here are some more important men who understand theology, so -called bishops, who are responsible for a group of churches.

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So the role of the bishop kind of elevates during this time. So it changes from what is there in the Bible to the point where the bishop becomes somebody who is even higher.

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So all the people are looking up to him. One of the other problems that the church goes through is the people who are called the lapsed.

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And as I mentioned there were some people who said, you know, I am a Christian but I just can't go through this.

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I know the Lord will forgive me. And they go through this time and then they feel really bad a couple of weeks down the road.

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How could I have done this? And they want fellowship. They come back to the church. And there's a new pastor here and he says,

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I'm not sure what I should do here. And the people whose father died, for example, they say, you can't do this.

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My dad stood for the faith and he died and here's somebody who denied Christ and you are bringing him back. And so this is a struggle that the early church has to face with two of the men who weighed in on it heavily were

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Novation and Cyprian. Cyprian said, once you're denied, you're out of the church, you can't come back no matter what your new, whatever you come back telling us.

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But Novation says, well if you are genuine, we want to bring you back in. So there's a period of time where they test the men to make sure that they are genuine and then restore them back to fellowship.

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Now the problem is there wasn't just one time of persecution. You have persecution happening over and over again.

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And sometimes the same person who denied the first time would deny again and then how do you deal with this?

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So when we think of reconciliation within the local church, we need to think of what the early church went through and they did.

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They did reconcile some of the men who it was a matter of life and death. And here sometimes for petty things we find reconciliation very difficult.

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But the same Lord worked during those times in preserving the church and bringing them through. And he's the same

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Lord who works among us now in carrying through reconciliation, especially in difficult times like this.

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But things soon change. As I said with Diocletian, the persecution starts to die out. And then we have

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Constantine. Constantine believes that he was empowered by Christ in order to win and he considers himself a

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Christian and the role of the church changes. Actually I should stop for a moment here.

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When I say church, I'm going to be referring to what is perceived as the mainstream of church.

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Sometimes they are the church, true bride of Christ. Sometimes they are less pure than they should be in certain areas, some important areas in certain times.

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And sometimes they are just apostate. They're just so -called church, but they're not really a church. So when

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I use the term church here, so please make sure you that's what I'm referring to. What is generally known as a church. And in Constantine's time, persecution ends and this church now becomes accepted and then soon the state religion.

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Everybody ought to go here. That opens the door wide. Everybody comes in and you no longer have to be really convicted about the truth to be willing to go through persecution.

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But if you belong to this church, you're socially accepted. You're part with the in crowd.

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And that's another problem once the persecution ends that the church becomes very light. Just as we have physical persecution, there was also intellectual assaults against what the

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Christians believed. And as you can imagine, we have the scriptures. These men are faithful. Their lives have been transformed by Christ.

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They go out and proclaim the gospel. And then the gospel, the cross is foolishness to the world.

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The Greeks think, what kind of God is this who would die for you? And some of the early men start to systematize their theology.

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Not to write systematic theology, but rather try to put all the pieces together to understand and be able to present it in a way that makes coherent sense from God being the creator to you being a sinner and requiring

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Christ. And one of the men who does that is Justin Martyr. And his goal is to both address the

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Jews who are rejecting the Christians and also the Greeks in terms of this foolishness of the gospel.

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And with the Jews, it's much easier because you have Matthew, the Gospels, which already talk about the Messiah and how

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Christ is the Messiah. And then when you talk about the Greeks, it's a little harder because he wants to talk in their level, use their terminology, use their understanding of words in order to explain to them how

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Christ is superior. One of the things he does is use the word Logos. In the contemporary language,

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Logos referred to, it was Middle Platonism during this time, philosophically. And Logos referred to the ordered state of the world and how it was reasonable and logical.

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And he tries to use the same Logos you have in John 1 .1 to kind of build that bridge in connecting the gospel to the

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Greeks. And in some ways, he does explain the gospel clearer, but in other ways, he actually brings the external philosophies back into the scripture, reading into things which are not there.

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So this is always a dangerous thing for apologists when they try to build bridges that you use the

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Bible as the only means of communicating truth. So that's a brief overview of the persecution.

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As you can see, there was problems, but the Lord was faithful through those times. We're going to skip through section 3, just to highlight some key men who were involved in theology during those times in North Africa.

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Alexandria is closer to Israel than Carthage, which is closer to Rome. Alexandria was a philosophical center.

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Carthage was a more practical place. Some of the men in Alexandria are Clement, not the previous

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Clement of Rome, and also Origen, who is very famous for his allegorizing of the text.

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And in Carthage, we have Tertullian, very, very literal interpretation, very focused on holiness of the individual

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Christian. And we have Cyprian, who actually is involved in bringing some of the Catholic doctrines into the church.

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But we wouldn't get into them. The second thing I want to look at is the heresies. In 1 Peter, the church,

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Peter writes about persecution, and in the second episode, he talks about false doctrine.

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Let's just read the verse here from 2 Peter 2 .1. But false prophets also arose among the people.

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Here, Peter's talking about the Old Testament times. Just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the

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Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. You can see throughout the

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New Testament, Paul talking about it, John talking about it, in terms of what was going to happen with these false teachers, and it does happen.

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We start to see heresy creep within the church, while one of the means of this is these apologists, where they try to build these bridges that they imbibe the teaching of the people outside.

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The first and most important one is Gnosticism. All of you would be familiar with the

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Gospels or the pseudo -Gospels of Thomas, and more recently the Gospel of Judas, that is making headlines.

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These are Gnostic writings that just propagate their teaching a few centuries after Christ.

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And there was earlier forms of Gnosticism, proto -Gnosticism, they say, which were present even during John's time.

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When you read 1 John, he's talking about some of these men who were bringing these heresies, and who had separated from the church that John was writing to.

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One of the men was Serinthus, a contemporary of John. But the first great heretic is

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Marcion. He was Gnostic. He started in the church, he went, he was taught, and then his teachers could already start to see him drifting away.

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And then when he goes back to his land and he starts preaching, he says, well, Gnosticism must be the truth. Gnosticism is very syncretistic.

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They take pieces from different religions, it attaches now to the Christians, and so -called Christians now propagate this heresy.

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And Marcion takes the Bible, takes off all the Old Testament, he doesn't like it because it doesn't fit Gnostic theology, takes the

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New Testament, cuts away the books that refer to the Old Testament, has an abridged version that he uses for preaching.

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And he has a very strong personality. A lot of people follow him. And during this time,

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God raises Irenaeus, and Irenaeus stands up for positive theology.

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Marcion does what's wrong, God uses Irenaeus to defend the truth and preserve what is orthodox within the church.

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And then we have a few other groups. Montanism, these were a charismatic group. Montanus spoke in the first person like the

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Old Testament prophets, and talked about the second coming of Christ, and some of his prophecies were wrong.

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We have Monarchianism, there were two forms of it. The first one is a dynamic Monarchianism, which is better translated into Adoptionism.

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Before we go there, Monarchianism means Monarchio, one ruler, one God. So these men were very zealous for monotheism, they wanted just one

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God, and when I was with Jesus in the picture, they wanted to somehow make sure that they preserve the truth. They still didn't have a handle on the

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Trinity, and what they end up doing is, they say the Logos is a principle, for Adoptionism at least, that comes upon Jesus Christ, who is just Jesus, who is just a man, and then makes him or adopts him to be the

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Son of God. So they want to try to do something in order to preserve the unity of God, and they go down this heresy. The second form of Monarchianism is

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Modalism, which is much more common now, where they talk about the Father, Son, and the

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Spirit as just being different modes of one God. So there's no three persons there, it's just one

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God that is just showing up differently in different times and so forth. It's also called as Sabellianism, and you'd be surprised to find the number of churches that do teach this heresy now, so -called churches.

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Then we have Monarchianism, which is actually a Christian cult, they believe in dualism, two types, two good and evil gods, and their understanding of truth.

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Augustine was trapped here before he came to be a Christian. And then there is a form of Neoplatonism that also existed within the church, the heresy that crept in.

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So during these times of heresy, you'd think, you know, early church, we don't have grudging systematic theology or hard writing books, so these people would, you know, just dissipate and die, and they do not.

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God preserves his truth that is delivered once for all to the saints in the scripture, and he breaks that alive through his spirit in raising up and building these truths within the church.

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And one of the ways that happens is through these councils, where all these bishops of the churches gather together and say, here is something that's new, that's coming and attacking our belief system, and is this right?

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What should we do about it? So there are four councils that are listed in your sheet. The first one is Nicaea. The primary problem there was raised by this man called

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Arius, who said there was a time when Christ was not, meaning that Christ was begotten in time, he's not eternal.

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And then Athanasius and Alexander, who was his bishop, defend orthodoxy.

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And then through the Nicene Council, we see how Christology is defined with regards to the eternality of Christ, and also the nature of Christ being one with the

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Father. In Constantinople, we have other men, the Cappadocians. Two of the issues that are dealt with are

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Christology, who is Christ, defined even further beyond Nicene, and also the role of the

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Holy Spirit, that he is God. And then we have the Council of Ephesus, which really is a farce.

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There's really nothing that comes out of it. But the fourth one in Chalcedon, we have Pope Leo I.

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He looks at all the heresies, all the problems with their understanding of Christ and the Spirit and God, and then he codifies that into a sound doctrine in terms of Trinity, three persons, and Christ, two natures, divine and human.

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And puts that together, and then that almost settles it for quite a period of time, in terms of who

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God is. The next section, I'm going to skip very briefly. It talks about the papacy, how it grows.

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Some of the bishops of Rome are extremely prominent men, like Leo and Gregory, and they kind of elevate the role of the bishop from being first among equals, the

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Bishop of Rome, to becoming the successor of Peter.

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The worship starts to change. So here are times of degeneracy in the church, so -called church.

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From the pastor being one who teaches, you start to see that person become a priest.

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From the word being central in the worship, it now becomes the mass. From being a very simple form of worship, it now becomes ceremonial, once it's imperial within the church.

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And sacrament takes on a new role, and that's one of the sidefalls of persecution, where people added superstition to the

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Lord's Supper, that somehow there was some magical power that would enable them to go through these times of suffering. And Mariology creeps in very, very early on, and that just gains momentum with time.

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Monastics are initially reaction to this apostate church, and they're not actually connected to the church, although in time they become a subset of the organized church.

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There were individuals initially who started. It becomes a community soon, and they do have their contribution, because in a time when the church was degenerating, here were the men who were passionate for Christ, who had the scriptures, who would go out and evangelize and preach.

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And obviously they also had their problems, where their understanding of separation was wrong.

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You didn't need to flee from the world in order to be holy, and likewise you didn't need to be a monk in order to live a holy life.

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The holy calling was for the entire church. When the monks came into picture, they were looked at as high -tier

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Christians, and everybody else can just live normal Christian lives, and that's not biblical either.

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And the worst problem with the monks was the works righteousness creeps in, because you need to live a really strong life in order to be saved, as opposed to your life following a salvation that is purely of grace.

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And that trend again starts to creep very strongly into this church. Soon, with the barbarians, the power of Rome fades away, it falls, and classical learning, as we know it, is lost as the

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Dark Ages come in. I wanted to spend some time on Augustine, but I think we may not have the time to do it.

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So let me give you a very brief overview on Augustine, without getting into the details. Augustine is a giant.

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In Christendom, he is one of the men that stands out, head and shoulders above the rest. And two of the things he talks about are, what is the church, and how do you get saved, what is salvation?

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So ecclesiology and soteriology. And you will find throughout church history, ecclesiology is what picks up as the

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Roman Catholic Church builds upon it. So Augustine was wrong in his view of ecclesiology. And soteriology is something that he is right for the most part, and that kind of gets suppressed as the role of the church becomes more superior to that of grace in direct relationship with Christ.

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And then when the reformers come, they pick on what Augustine rightly understood about salvation, and it's almost ecclesiology against soteriology, when we'll come to the

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Reformation times, and that causes the split where Luther picks on the biblical doctrine of grace, which

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Augustine defines very correctly in his time. So we'll skip the first section on Donatism, which basically there was a schism or a split in the church during Augustine's time.

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There were these Donatists who split from the church, and in trying to counter them, Augustine comes up with his doctrine of, his doctrine about the church.

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Some of it is right, but then some of it he goes off in defining the catholicity of the church.

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And then with regards to grace, and this I want to spend just a couple of minutes on, Pelagianism.

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There was a monk called Pelagius who came from England. He came to Rome, he saw Rome, and he was like, wow, these people are living such wicked lives, and how can this be?

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And he reads Confessions of Augustine, and he says, this is the way this guy was saved, he lays it all on grace.

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That cannot be. People have to live a holy life, and how can they be saved? He says, it's not just that God picking and choosing people, you know, everybody has to live a holy life.

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Now, you all have the grace that you need. So he redefines the biblical concept of grace in order to achieve the kind of holiness that he wants to see in the world.

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So he says, for example, grace means you already have the law, you already have the

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Bible, God has given you grace through those things, and God has given Jesus Christ, so all you need to do is accept it and live it out.

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And that's possible for every single person. So Pelagian comes out and teaches his view of salvation and of holiness.

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And then Augustine writes back to him, and then he explains what is grace.

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He talks about original sin, how in Adam we all fell. He talks about total depravity, exactly as we would understand it.

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And you can see those signs there, you know, thumbs up for what he got right. He talks about free will, how it is free within the context of the nature.

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When you are in sin nature, you can only talk about your ability to make choices within that nature that you are in.

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Then he talks about grace, how God is preeminent in choosing and saving us.

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And without his work, we cannot be saved. And he also talks about predestination, which is both a logical consequence of understanding election and grace, and it's also exegetically proved through the text that this is true.

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When it goes to regeneration and perseverance, Augustine goes a little off.

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He has this view of regeneration that starts at baptism, and again during this time you have infant baptism.

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And also as a necessary consequence, you know, you have to reaffirm your belief when you're grown up, and obviously perseverance cannot occur because at any point in time you can choose to go away.

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So it's very hard to even understand how he had all of these two together, but at least in terms of total depravity,

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God's election, and God's grace, he is spot on. Some of his works here are listed in terms of his reading.

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We can still read them, they're very readable. We'll skip through AD 600 to 1100.

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It's a long period of time, but not much. The Church of England starts to grow. There is a tension between England and Rome.

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Politically, the Franks, you see Charles, Martel, Islam starts to advance rapidly through Africa and then tries to come into Europe, but as they try to cross over into France, Martel stops their advance and the

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Christian, at least the kingdoms are still in place. And Charles Main in AD 800 is now initiated by the church, and that brings an unholy alliance between the state and the church.

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Now they are both seen as two arms of God. The church is the religious arm and the state is the secular arm, and with an apostate church on one arm, you start to see real havoc that the devil uses during this period.

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This church splits between the East and West during this time. The Eastern Orthodox Church, when

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Rome moved its headquarters to Constantinople, we have patriarchs there. In Rome, as you saw the barbarians came, they fell down so there was no political power until the

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Franks bring that back up. But then we had the Pope who had the succession during this time.

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And there is a split that occurs primarily for theological reasons where they call each other damned.

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And so each one thinks he is the successor of Peter, but they are now irreconcilably broken.

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We'll skip Hildebrand for now and then move on to AD 1100 to 1500. In Hildebrand's time, the

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Pope is seen almost higher than the king in terms of the power and authority he wielded.

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The Crusades, we have eight Crusades here.

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The primary purpose was the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was considered important and spiritual. And now there was a threat to the ability for Christians to go there.

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So the church preaches on it. The kings gather together and then they send out the

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Crusade. They take over Jerusalem in the first Crusade. In the second Crusade, all they do is send reinforcements to keep

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Jerusalem. And then Saladin attacks and takes over. And then in the third Crusade, that's the famous one, the three kings from Germany, France, and England.

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Richard the Lionheart is one of them. It's a failure. They do not take back Jerusalem. The fourth

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Crusade is a small event. They try to go to Egypt, but instead end up taking Constantinople. And the fifth one, again, to Egypt.

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Egypt primarily because it's the headquarters of Saladin. And that is a disaster as well. The sixth one is a failure, but they negotiate some terms to go and see

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Jerusalem. And seventh and eighth are under Louis, who is made a saint.

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Yes, Pastor Mike. There's so much great stuff left,

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I don't want to... Okay, thank you.

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I do not have the power to stop the sun, so... Two parts works for me.

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Okay, I think what we'll do here is, so we'll take the rest of the sections in the next week, but before we go,

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I want us to still look back at the purpose of all of this. So if we just skip down to the very end in terms of God's sovereignty and human responsibility, even until what we have seen so far, we've gone through persecution, we've seen heresies, all of these could have easily wiped out the church, but they did not, only because God was sovereign and he was able to preserve his church through these difficult times.

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In human terms, some of these seems really horrible in terms of where the papacy goes and how the truth is not preserved.

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And in our mind, we would say, how could they? But if you look at the Bible again, you see times where the church went through such...

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where Israel went through such times. And even the church, if you think of Galatians and Corinthians and the problems they went through, but God was faithful.

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He preserved his remnant, he preserved his truth, and he brought the church to where it ought to be. And one charge

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I want to leave you with is that you would reflect on God's power and his rule in the world, even as we leave this

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Sunday school class, because that ought to transform our lives, no matter what our personal situation is, what our situation in our local churches, which is good by God's grace, and what the situation is in the churches outside, it is only by God's grace that all...

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God is still sovereign in and through all of them. And our call is to live out the life that we are called to live in the place that we are called to, especially within the local church, to be faithful to what he has given us and recognize that we have our own weaknesses and our strengths, but we should exercise our gifts within the context of the local church, especially as it relates to one another, recognize that we are all sinners redeemed by grace, none of us is perfect, and as we relate to one another with our brothers and sisters in Christ who have their own weaknesses, we ought to be gentle and loving, and know that God is sovereign even in their lives, just as he is in ours, and bringing us to the point where one day we will be presented spotless before the throne.

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So with that, why don't we close in prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we praise you,

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Lord, for the powerful and awesome God that you are. We praise you for what the

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Word declares about you. We praise you for what we see you have done, both in the pages of Scripture and in the life of the church and in our own lives.

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I pray, Lord, that you would empower us, that we would be faithful to you in whatever place you've called us to be.

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Lord, as we the rest of this worship time, Lord, we commit into your hands. I pray that you would speak powerfully,

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Lord, through your Word, through the pastor, and that we would go out from here transformed and live out the life that you have called us to.