God's Sovereignty In Church History (part 1)

God's Sovereignty in Church History and the Church's Future

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 BBC has come... progressed 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 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? More than I did. And do you know how many churches are there underneath the water?

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

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. 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 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 are no longer churches now.

So today, we are not going to be looking at any particular local church, but rather at the universal church. How is it that church from the 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, God was still active and alive.

One of the things we see in the Bible is that it declares God's hand among His people, which is recorded in history in the Bible. So when we see His dealings with Israel in the Old Testament, especially as you look at the history books of the 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 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 God's hand was in those events in accomplishing what He wanted to be done.

They were recorded faithfully. They are accurate representation of history. They also show God's view of His hand with His people. The second section we have here, the background of the 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. The first nine refer to the Old Testament. We have the 10th section, which talks about the period between the 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.

Pentecost, the Spirit of God comes on His people. We see Peter and Paul and their ministries. And then we end with the 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 New Testament. And our purpose this morning, picking up in Section 3, actually, let me hold on for a second here. 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 in the context of today's 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 there, we have creation. It's glorious. God, with His spoken word, brings all of creation, the universe into existence. And then we have Adam and Eve and the fall, a 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 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 God's hand, and we're going to see that hand continue both through good and difficult times with the church.

In the 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.

Revelation 19 and Ephesians 5: Christ and His Bride

Now, before we get into the events of history, I want to look at two passages here. You can turn to your Bibles because the text here is kind of 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.

I'm just going to read that out loud. Let us rejoice and exult and give him glory, for the marriage of the 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 Christ and his bride, the church. And the term here, as we look in Ephesians, shows the intimate relationship that the church has with its head, which is Christ.

And the church is going to be married to Christ in the end. And how is this going to happen? We see that in Ephesians 5, 25 -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 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 words in our mind, especially as you look at some of the darkest moments that the church goes through, because we know 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 I've broken down into three major periods. In terms of time frame, roughly, 800 -600, and then we'll be looking at 600 -1100, and 1100 -1500.

Most of the time we'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. 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. So beginning with the first section, what I have here first is the Apostolic Fathers.

And here they're called the 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 New Testament times.

And these were also men who had written down what was going on, what they had learned in books, which gives us insight into the early church. Some of the men and their writings here are Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp, the letter Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache, which is the teachings, initially thought to be the writings of the 12 disciples, but really 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, 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. 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, how many of you remember how old Polycarp was when he was put to martyrdom?

That's right. He was 86 years old, a very old man. People wanted him to just deny Christ and escape this thing. But he said, 86 years, my 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. We find how they worshiped 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. It gives us an insight into the early church. There are three things that I want to spend time on here.

One will be the time of persecution. The second will be the time of Pharisees. And the third will be the time of Augustine. And everything else we will just skim through. I want to spend time on persecution because, especially it ties in with what we learned in church two weeks ago.

One of the passages that we did hear 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 Peter was writing to and how that came about in the early church times.

1 Peter 4, 12 -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 insofar as you share Christ's suffering, that you may also rejoice and be glad when His glory is revealed.

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

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 is a group of people who come out of the Jewish community and they are initially identified with them, but then people around them start to realize these guys are even weirder than the Jewish people.

They have something that's very different. And then they have a lot of misunderstanding about this group. 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. I'm not sure what's going on. These guys are really off. And then they are actually, maybe they are cannibals. They eat the body and blood of their Lord. So there's already a sense of unrest around the people that they live in.

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

The first group is the local persecution. Primarily this was around Rome. We see most of us are familiar with the persecution under Nero. It was extremely brutal. There was a lot of torture. Very inhumane.

Rome burns. Nero needs a scapegoat. Christians are despised. Hey, they are the ones that 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.

Then we have Marcus Aurelius 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. It wasn't as widespread as Nero's time.

One of the men who dies here is Justin Martyr. And then we have Septimus Severinus. And again, there's another Caesar where there is very intense persecution of the Christians. Again, locally in the Roman city.

And then we have empire-wide persecutions. 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 persecutions happens in pockets of time.

Some of them more extended than others. 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 through, maybe it's because of these Christians.

These guys are actually atheists. They don't have any gods that we worship. 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.

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. I don't like what these people are teaching.

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.

So they want to get rid of these people and bring back the glory of Rome again. And they do various things. 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. And the Christians knew that this was going to a level that it shouldn't. And they couldn't pray the kind of homage that the Romans wanted.

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

These are not consecutive Caesars. These are times when things are OK, and then again it comes back with fury. And then the last one under which we have persecution is under Diocletian. And it's a very extended period of time, very brutal, and then what happens is by the time Diocletian's persecution comes, even the Roman people are tired.

What are we doing with these Christians? We are just beating them, beating them. We are just sick of all this torture and persecution. Even the people are tired of it. But by the time Diocletian ends, persecution has come to an end.

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

Now, yes, Daniel. That's exactly right.

So Daniel just mentioned about the church in Smyrna and how through persecutions they remain more faithful to the Lord that they were called by than when things are smooth and everything is going easy and they tend to forget him.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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. So the next man on the line is now asked to do the same thing. You consider, should I do this? Am I really denying Christ by doing this?

So can I just compromise my faith for just a little while and then come back to the faith? 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.

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 her family as well either. So 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. Some men deny their faith, not necessarily because they deny Christ in their hearts, but they just don't want to take the consequences.

Some men say, no, that's OK. 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. And then others say, oh, this religion is not for me.

I don't want to get killed. They are those who truly deny Christ, traitors who then say, OK, here's how I can curry favor with the empire. I'll go tell where all the churches are. I'll find the Bibles and burn them in front so I'm looking good before the Romans.

So those are not 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? Leadership. So here are some more important men who understand theology, so-called bishops, who are responsible for a group of churches.

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

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, 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, I'm not sure what I should do here. And the people whose father died, for example, they say, honey, you can't do this. 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 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. 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. Now, the problem is there wasn't just one time of persecution. You have persecution happening over and over again.

And sometimes the same person who denied the first time would deny again. And then how do you deal with this? So when we think of reconciliation within the local church, we need to think of what the early church went through.

And they did. 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. But the same Lord worked during those times in preserving the church and bringing them through.

And he's the same Lord who works among us now in carrying through reconciliation, especially in difficult times like this. But things soon change. As I said, with Diocletian, the persecution starts to die out.

And then we have Constantine. Constantine believes that he was empowered by Christ in order to win. And he considers himself a Christian. And the role of the church changes. Actually, I should stop for a moment here.

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

And sometimes they are just apostate. They're just so-called church, but they're not really a church. So when I use the term church here, so please make sure 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, 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.

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

And as you can imagine, we have the scriptures. These men are faithful. Their lives have been transformed by Christ. They go out and proclaim the gospel. And then the gospel, the cross is foolishness to the world.

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. 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 Christ.

And one of the men who does that is Justin Martyr. And his goal is to both address the Jews who are rejecting the Christians and also the Greeks in terms of this foolishness of the gospel. And with the Jews, it's much easier because you have Matthew, the gospels, which already talk about the Messiah and how 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 Christ is superior.

One of the things he does is use the word logos. In the contemporary language, 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.

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 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.

So this is always a dangerous thing for apologists when they try to build bridges that you use the Bible as the only means of communicating truth. So that's a brief overview of the persecution. As you can see, there was problems, but the Lord was faithful through those times.

False Doctrine, Gnosticism, and the Early Councils

We're going to skip through Section 3, just highlight some key men who were involved in theology during those times in North Africa. Alexandria is closer to Israel than Carthage, which is closer to Rome.

Alexandria was a philosophical center. Carthage was a more practical place. Some of the men in Alexandria are Clement, not the previous Clement of Rome, and also Origen, who's very famous for his allegorizing of the text.

And in Carthage, we have Tertullian, very, very literal interpretation, very focused on holiness of the individual Christian. And we have Cyprian, who actually is involved in bringing some of the Catholic doctrines into the church.

But we wouldn't get into them. The second thing I want to look at is the heresies. In 1 Peter, the church, Peter writes about persecution, and in the second episode, he talks about false doctrine. Let's just read the verse here from 2 Peter 2 .1.

But false prophets also arose among the people. Here, Peter's talking about the Old Testament times. Just as there will be false teachers among you who will secretly bring in Jews, bringing in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

You can see throughout the 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. 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.

The first and most important one is Gnosticism. All of you would be familiar with the Gospels or the pseudo-Gospels of Thomas, and more recently the Gospel of Judas that is making headlines. These are Gnostic writings that just propagate their teaching a few centuries after Christ.

And there were earlier forms of Gnosticism, Proto -Gnosticism they say, which were present even during John's time. When you read 1 John, he is talking about some of these men who were bringing these heresies and who had separated from the church that John was writing to.

One of the men was Serinthus, contemporary of John. But the first great heretic is Marcion. He was Gnostic. He started in the church. He was taught. His teachers could already start to see him drifting away.

And then when he goes back to his land and he starts preaching, he says, Gnosticism must be the truth. Gnosticism is very syncretistic. They take pieces from different religions. It attaches now to the Christians, and so-called Christians now propagate this heresy.

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

And he has a very strong personality. A lot of people follow him. And during this time, God raises Irenaeus. And Irenaeus stands up for positive theology. Marcion does what's wrong. God uses Irenaeus to defend the truth.

And preserve what is orthodox within the church. And then we have a few other groups. Montanism, these were a charismatic group. Montaners spoke in the first person like the Old Testament prophets. And talked about the second coming of Christ.

And some of his prophecies were wrong. We have Monarchianism. There were two forms of it. The first one is dynamic Monarchianism, which is better translated into adoptionism. Before we go there. Monarchianism means mono archio, one ruler, one God.

So these men were very zealous for monotheism. They wanted just one God. And now 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 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 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 modalism, which is much more common now. Where they talk about the Father, Son and the Spirit as just being different modes of one God.

So there are no three persons there. It's just one 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.

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. Augustine was trapped here before he came to be a Christian.

And then there is a form of Neo-Platonism that also existed within the church, the heresy that crept in. So during these times of heresy, you'd think, you know, early church, we don't have systematic theology or hard writing books.

So these people would just dissipate and die. And they do not. 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 this truth within the church.

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?

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 Arius who said there was a time when Christ was not.

Meaning that Christ was begotten in time. He is not eternal. And then Athanasius and Alexander, who was his bishop, defend orthodoxy. 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 Father.

In Constantinople, we have other men, the Cappadocians. Two of the issues that are dealt with are Christology, who is Christ, defined even further beyond Nicene and also the role of the Holy Spirit, that he is God.

And then we have the Council of Ephesus, which really is a farce. There's really nothing that comes out of it. But the fourth one in Chalcedon, we have Pope Leo I. 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. And puts that together and then that almost settles it for quite a period of time in terms of who God is.

The Papacy, Monasticism, and Augustine's Legacy

The next section I'm going to skip very briefly. It talks about the papacy, how it grows. 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 bishop of Rome, to becoming the successor of Peter.

The worship starts to change. So here are times of degeneracy in the church, so-called church. From the pastor being one who teaches, you start to see that person become a priest. 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. And sacrament takes on a new role. And that's one of the sidefalls of persecution where people added superstition to the 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. 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.

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.

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

The holy calling was for the entire church. But when the monks came into picture, they were looked at as high-tier Christians, and everybody else can just live normal Christian lives. And that's not biblical either.

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.