Early Christian Martyrdom

Are going to be looking at early Christian martyrdom. It's a very strange subject to many of us because we are not challenged to be martyrs today. But as we do this, I think you will be encouraged to see, you know, here is how God operated in the church, in the early church, and we'll see some in the New Testament.

And these men and women walked a path that is alien to us, and yet we can learn from them how God was faithful to them and how we ought to be faithful ourselves in our suffering. I have a lot of material, and I believe we need to finish here at 1040.

Is that right, Ezra? Yeah, so I'll kind of go quickly through it, but if you have questions, please ask. And if you have anything you want to share, please lift your hand. I want you to speak because I think it's more important that we engage with the subject than just get through all my notes.

Defining Martyrdom as Witness unto Death

I'm going to lay out what we are going to do in a minute before we dive in. But before I do that, I have a question. Can someone tell me the first martyr ever? Who was the first martyr? James, Wes, good answer.

Anyone else? Stephen, excellent. Anyone else? Jesus, even better. We're getting warmer here, okay. Jesus, I'm sorry. Cain. Cain, who was that? Brad, thank you. If I had said first Christian martyr, I think you would have come closer with Stephen or James.

And Jesus definitely was a martyr. And I want to use that to just explain what the term martyr is. A martyr is someone who witnesses or testifies. And that's basically the meaning of the word. But what we actually have with that word is the association is witnessing by your death.

That's basically how we see the word martyr. It's not just somebody who just died, but someone who has testified and witnessed to Jesus Christ by his death. And Jesus did testify to himself as well. So that would be the right answer.

Now, with regards to Cain, in Hebrews 11, four, if you do want to flip really quick, I think Cain would indeed qualify when I can turn there in a minute. Hebrews 11, four says, Did we say Cain or Abel?

I'm sorry. Cain was the one who murdered and Abel was the one who was the witness, the martyr. So by faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts.

And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. So that was just to get you thinking about martyrs, people who testify by their blood because they are unashamed of the gospel and they want people to know who Jesus is.

So today we're gonna look at martyrs in the context of suffering. Like I said, if we were in a place where you could die for your faith, I think we would be just looking at a direct application of martyrdom.

The gift of giving up your life for Jesus Christ. Thankfully, that is not the circumstance of our country today. There are places in the world where that would be genuinely true. But for us, we will be looking at it from the aspect of the suffering that you face on the sake of Christ.

So when you witness, when you testify to Christ, the kind of suffering that you're gonna endure, you wanna look at these martyrs, both in the Bible and in the early church, and say, this is how God was faithful to these men and these women.

And I ought to be faithful to God as well when I go through my suffering. So we're gonna look at suffering in the broad context, bring it down to martyrs, those who died on behalf of Jesus Christ. So we'll begin by looking at the New Testament.

We're gonna look at a few verses so you just get the idea of what the Bible says. And we'll look at some verses speaking to it. We'll look at some people. And once we do that, we're gonna go through a series of people in the early church.

And I'm gonna go quickly rapid fire through them. And like I said, please feel free to interrupt me when you need to. So let me begin with a general verse on suffering. And that's in James 1, 2 -4. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.

For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness or patience and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. So every time we see a suffering, whether it is for the cause of Christ or anything else, you always ought to look at it as God's divine purpose in your life and you ought to receive it with great joy.

And we will see how the martyrs did the same thing, both in the New Testament and in the early church. And I think there is a passage which I'm not gonna read here. For sake of time, you can just mark that down.

1 Peter 4, 12 -16 talks about this suffering and how we ought to look at it with great joy and endure through it. Another verse is in 1 Peter 2, 21. For to this you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving an example so that you might follow in his steps.

There's a lot of different ways in which we ought to follow Christ. There is one way in which we can only receive from Christ, that is the atonement that Christ has accomplished, but there is a lot of ways, especially in a suffering that God has called us to follow after him.

He says, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. So when you go through suffering, you wanna keep your chief exemplar, that is Jesus Christ and seek to follow him. And now I wanna just pick up a few events, especially from the book of Acts, and then frame this martyrdom context in the early church before we go post New Testament.

Martyrdom in Acts and the Witness of the Apostles

So the first one is in Acts chapter four. You don't have to turn to any of these, you can if you want to. So we have Peter and John speaking with the people right after healing the guy who was lame. And then the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them, greatly annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead.

And they arrested them and put them in custody until the next day for it was already evening. And what you see here is the apostles are preaching, and then you have the political and religious forces come down, clamp down on them, arresting them in order to do something.

You will see later that there was a council, but they are exonerated. And then you have Acts seven. And this is one event, and this evening we'll be talking about this in the message. When Stephen was talking, we will see that God was speaking through him.

God's wisdom and his power was manifest through him when he speaks to these council members who were unbelievers. And these people, their response was this in verse 54. When they heard these things, they were enraged and they ground their teeth against him.

But he, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, behold, I see the heavens opened and the son of man standing at the right hand of God.

But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him. And this is a mob. This is not really a judicial execution. And they cast him out of the city and they stoned him.

They had no right to kill Stephen politically. They were under the Romans who should have tried. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he cried out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

And falling to his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. So talking about following in the footsteps of Christ, you know, Jesus forgiving those people on the cross.

And likewise, Stephen emulates this. And you can see the level of, there is a grace that is given to Stephen that is supernatural. When I try to put myself in Stephen's position, I'm thinking, can I do that?

But for the grace of God, yes. And the goal here is not to lift Stephen up or lift the other martyrs up, but to look to the God who enabled these men to go through impossible circumstances and yet glorifying God in those circumstances.

So while we are looking at our own suffering, we want to look and see these men and say, yes, Lord, I thank you for these witnesses who went all the way. And I want to be a witness in my own life as well.

And then we have Acts 9, which is the remarkable event where Saul, a witness at Stephen, goes to kill others, put them in prison, and God changes him inside out. And then in Acts 9, 1, we see that event.

And in Acts 9, 27, we have the church still afraid of Saul. You have this Saul who's a persecutor of the church now converted. And then we need Barnabas who takes him and brings him to the apostles. And then in 27, we read, he declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord who spoke to him.

And at Damascus, he preached boldly in the name of Jesus. And one of those dramatic events where a persecutor now becomes a proclaimer of the gospel. And did Stephen's martyrdom, you think, have something to do with it?

You will see in the early church that the martyrs were instrumental in the conversion of those who were initially opposed to the gospel. And one of the key men was Justin Martyr, whom we'll get to in the end.

And James, that we see in Acts 12, 1. At that time, Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James, the brother of John, with a sword. This is Peter, James, and John, that James.

And when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. And then he seized him, put him in prison, delivering him up to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people.

And so Peter was kept in prison, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. And what you will see here is Herod's goal was to kill Peter, just as he killed James, and just as, well, the people killed Stephen.

But God's purpose was Peter was gonna be extended a little longer. Peter will be martyred, but not at this point, because God's timing was different. And the church would fervently pray. You have that miracle of that prison getting open and Peter rescued and continuing to work powerfully.

With Cornelius and the others. So with that, I wanna just give you, that's a sense of the Bible. What do we have in the early church? There's plenty of stuff remaining. You can go through the book of Revelation, see all the different persecutions and the sufferings that come.

But I wanna now skip post-New Testament. So very early church, what happens after the Bible is done? The church was politically illegal in the early church, in the early period. And so there was persecution for various periods of time in various degrees.

Initially, it was very sporadic. It was not like a continuous persecution. And one of the men, King Trajan, Emperor Trajan, he was told about these Christians, and then that they wouldn't worship the gods of the Romans or emperor.

And then Trajan is like, okay, you know, I don't wanna do a search and destroy type of thing. If someone becomes visible, get them out and punish them as an example, but you don't need to go and sweep every corner and find out all these Christians.

So that was the level of persecution. If you got caught, then you're in trouble, but you could just be in somewhere quiet and you don't get killed. But then things change. So when you're a Christian, it's not just the testimony that you're giving to the political leaders, it is a testimony that you give to your neighbors and your friends.

And so when you are standing in stark contrast against a society, a society that does certain things and believes in certain things, and you're saying, I reject those because God in Jesus Christ has saved me from all these.

And this is the way of God. This is the way of righteousness and holiness. You would expect some conflict between the society and the church, especially this church at this time is not, you know, the state church.

It is just growing. It's a fledgling church, just coming out and growing as they are dispersed out of Jerusalem into the different parts of the Roman empire. And we have, for example, in Lyon in 177 AD, there is a reaction against this church.

We don't exactly know what caused it, but a mob goes into the crowd, into the town looking for Christians. And the Christians were forbidden from the public square, you know, to be out there doing their thing.

And these mob would just deliberately drag them in there because they are now violating the law. And then the people would have to now act against these Christians, and then you have persecution begin in that case.

But in general, the state was not eagerly looking forward to persecute. Till about 280, we just have these sporadic incidents, but nothing full blown in terms of what we would normally remember. And what happens until 200 is, if your parent or your family member was the one who was picked and killed in this persecution, small though it may be, you will not forget that they died for the name of Christ.

And it wasn't just your family, but it was the church as a whole who would remember these martyrs. So it wasn't just some event that just came and went by and our church goes on as usual. They kept lists of these people who died for the faith.

And they would say, you know, these are the men and women who honored Christ through their death, and we want to remember the God of these martyrs who counted them worthy to die on behalf of the faith.

So that was the view of the church. This was still not, the possibility was still strong that they could be the next martyr, but they would remember these men and these women, and then praise God who was faithful to them in this suffering and persecution.

And then 200 and on, you have empire-wide persecution. So now it's no longer just here and there, some guy pulls you out and you're in trouble, but the empire now comes and moves out against the Christian.

Septimus Severus was one of the emperors, the other one was Decius, and these were violent, brutal oppressions. We pray to God that we do not have such circumstances in our life here today, but if things do get worse, these are good examples, time periods to go back and look and see how the church was, they tried to wipe out the church.

That was their goal was, okay, here is a human organization, and we need to just get rid of this because this is not a good thing for our state that a church should exist. And humans and their emperors tried everything they can to destroy.

And as we will see in a minute, that was just the seed of the church. As the blood of the martyrs was spilled, the churches grew and blew in proportions that humans just could not comprehend. And we will see how that happened in these people's lives.

And when you look at martyrs, the church, for us, you may think of evangelists, which for those of you in the morning service, we all are. Evangelism is normally a borderline between the church and the community, right?

So you go there and you preach the gospel to those who are unbelievers. And to the early church, it was the body of the martyr that was the line. You get that far and then you're gonna get killed. And people viewed these martyrs with much respect because they had been faithful to God and God had been faithful to them.

Ignatius and the Meaning of a Call to Martyrdom

Let me actually just skip on now to talk about some of these men that I think would be helpful for you. I'm gonna begin with a man called Ignatius. His name is Ignatius. He was an Antioch. He was a bishop in Antioch.

Syria, just above Jerusalem. Trajan comes there and then he has issued this warning that you ought to worship all the Roman gods and especially the emperor. Ignatius goes there and says, no, I cannot.

He confesses Christ before him. He is told to be sent to Rome and be killed. And so Ignatius, on the way from Antioch to Rome, writes seven letters and those letters are with us. And then you see the view of early Christians when they were going to be martyred.

Sometimes when I think of martyrdom, I foolishly say this. I say, Lord, in comparison to this suffering, which just seems to have no end, it would be easier to be a martyr. I'll just die and go to heaven.

What a glorious thing it would be. And that would be true. But martyrdom wasn't just something that they came, they shot you and you're dead. As we will see in the lives of these people, this was a long drawn process.

You wouldn't know when you were going to die. You had that threat of death hanging over you. You would be beaten, there would be a lot of things going on far worse than any of the sufferings we would go through, but God was faithful to preserve many of them to be confessing Christ even when they got up to the very end.

And Ignatius was one of them. In one of the ways we learn about the early church's view of martyrdom was Ignatius calls his call to martyrdom as a way to God. He basically says, God has ordained it for me to die on his behalf.

And that is the means that he has gifted me, called me to, so that I can honor him. And so Ignatius was one of those people and Ignatius goes a little too far, I think. And he would say to the church, please don't hinder my martyrdom because it seems like some of the Christians in Rome had some influence to be able to work politically, see if they can get Ignatius out.

And Ignatius was like, no, this is great. I'm going to die for Christ. So don't be too kind to me. I will read a few verses a little later to show you what Ignatius was thinking. But I don't think he goes too far.

We will see other men who would just say, let me just die. I'll do everything to get myself caught and killed for the name of Christ. Ignatius wasn't that way. His main goal was to honor Christ. And he would tell the others, each of you, God has ordained the means by which you are to suffer in the way in which you are to testify.

Not everybody is called to be a martyr, but when I am called to be a martyr, you do not hinder me from being that. Don't be unseasonably kind to my body and have disregard for my spirit. Rather, pray for me so that I would be faithful, that I would proclaim Christ.

And to the very end, I would prove myself to be a disciple of Christ. I have professed myself to be a disciple of Christ, but now let my actions prove that when I go down the path to my end. And like I said, this man had a vivid imagination.

As he writes, he talks about his bones being crushed. He knows what is going to happen as he faces the wild beast. And he says, I know everything and I am not afraid of going there, but yet I know my flesh is weak, so I need your prayers so that I will endure to the end.

And he sees this call as something that is ordained by God. We see our suffering that comes to us placed handpicked by God. And now that he has been condemned by the Roman state, he sees that as not just something that the political people did, but rather what God has done.

And he says, my martyrdom will please God because God is the author of my martyrdom and he will bring about his purpose through this. And one of the things that we look at in terms of martyrdom is when we go through suffering, when we have problems in our lives, let's say it's financial, one of the things that you learn through it, the sanctification that happens is I do not depend on my money in order to survive.

I depend on my God who is above this money. And martyrdom in one sense is the ultimate rejection of the world and all its support systems. It's a, my life, nobody has control over it but God and I'm giving it freely to him.

And so from Ignatius as he writes, he would say, I have no, this is a means that God has given to me to sanctify to me and to glorify me. And I'm glad that he has brought that in order to demonstrate my rejection of the world.

And he would quote scripture, to be absent in the body is to be present with the Lord. And he had a deep sense of assurance that God was calling him through this. And then as he writes to these churches, he says, don't moan, this is a time for great praise and you are to rejoice in God that we have this opportunity to showcase the excellencies of our God in circumstances that is mind, that is baffling to the world.

When the world sees death in such horrific manner, they cringe from it, they cry from it, they try to run away from it. We will not do that. We will glorify our God when we go through these trials. And for Ignatius, he sees that martyrdom as the best means for him to showcase his love for God because God has called him to do that.

And I'm gonna just read a few quotes and then we'll move on to the next person. He says, for example, to the Romans, for I am afraid of your love lest it do me an injury. Don't stop me from becoming a martyr.

Only request, he's asking them to pray, in my behalf, both inward and outward strength that I may not only speak, which is testify, but truly will. So let not my words just be words that I say, but let them come from my heart, from my whole being, as I'm testifying before my death, that I may not merely be called a Christian, but really be found to be one.

And he's saying, this is how I want you to pray for me. Don't pray for just my escape. Pray for me to be a bold witness for Jesus Christ. And as you can see, he is teaching these churches what it means to be, to go through suffering.

He's one of the early, this is 107 AD he dies. It's very, very early. He and Polycarp knew the Apostle John. They were men who had witnessed, received the testimony from the apostles. And then the church is gonna suffer for another couple of hundred years.

And these are words, not just words, but also lives that the early church had to say, this is how God was faithful, and we are not ashamed of the gospel, and we will go through faithfully as well. He says, for example, let tearings, breakings, and dislocation of bones, let cutting off of members, let shatterings of the whole body, and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me, only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

He knows what he's going through, but his focus is firmly fixed on Jesus. And he says, I'm gonna go, I wanna go, and I wanna meet my Lord, and that is what I desire. All the pleasures of the world, all the kingdoms of this earth shall profit me nothing.

It is better for me to die in behalf of Jesus Christ than to reign over the ends of the earth. So as you can see, how was the early church thinking through this martyrdom? The intensity with which we love God seems almost amplified a thousand times when these martyrs were going to meet their end.

They knew their Lord, they were faithful to him, and they loved him enough to say, I wanna go, I wanna die on behalf of me. Let me stop here with Ignatius. I'll take a couple of questions, and then we'll move on to the next person.

Is there any questions so far on what we've covered? Yes, Peggy. I'm gonna read one account where we will see both. The mob, the Roman mob, was bloodthirsty. They enjoyed these executions and torture, but the leaders, the Roman governors and the people who were actually conducting this will actually give them an opportunity.

Hey, listen, last chance. You see the lions, you see the fire, you see everything else, you can escape. Just deny Christ or just worship Caesar, pretty easy. And it is against those odds that these men would have to say, no, I will not.

So the next person is Polycarp.

Yes, yes.

I was gonna cover that later, but I'll do it now. No, this is a good time to do it. So while we had men who are faithful, people who were bold and unashamed of the gospel, you also had people of two categories.

One would be, this is becoming harder, the two-service. I can't say too much about what I heard at the first. So what is that? No, Pastor Steve is right there. No, there were some who were not believers, who would just say that they were Christians and martyrdom or the threat of martyrdom would expose them and they would go all the way.

They would reject Christ and they would be traitors to the church. They would point out the people in the church to the authorities. And then you had others who just failed, who sinned in being unwilling to testify to God.

And then they would come back and be restored. They were called the lapsed, people who would lapse in that moment of trial. And then later the spirit of God would convict them and they would come back in.

And you'll have men like Cyprian who would talk about, how do you bring these people back into the church? Especially when you have a member in the church whose dad died for the faith. And then this person who rejected and then wants to come back and be part of the fellowship again.

Not just once, maybe twice, thrice. How do you deal with this thing in the body? Who is a genuine Christian? So if you think we have trouble with our church, our churches today, their conflicts were a lot more difficult, but the Lord was gracious to them to bring them and grow the church through all these difficulties.

Yes, so they had a means by which they would say, you need to demonstrate that your repentance is genuine. And when they did, they were brought back in.

Yes, can you? That's true, very true.

So one of the direct impact was, if you are the man and you died, your wife could not find a job to actually support herself. She would need to become a prostitute or something else in order to support the family.

The children would be destitutes. And it was just the church that would bring them alongside and support and care for them. And you will see in one of the examples, I'll probably say it right now. So you might, let's actually skip to that.

I think that's a good example. There was a couple of women martyrs who were so, that we can't even picture it, what they went through, that Augustine, a couple of hundred years later, would actually preach every year on the martyrdom of these women, just to honor what God had done through these women.

The women's name were Perpetua and Felicitas. Perpetua was a well-to-do woman. She was born. Actually, let me just read a few things from her so you can see what she says. So it's a prison diary of hers that survives.

So we have some editing done by others in terms of after she died, how she died. It was about 200 AD she died. And her dad, who's a wealthy man, a Roman patriarch, he actually favors his daughter because she's learned.

He actually favors her over his sons, which is unusual in the Roman society. And then when they were under arrest, she was 22 years old. She had just been married. She has an infant who is still suckling.

And that's the circumstance of Felicitas, Perpetua. My father, out of love for me, was trying to persuade me and to shake my resolution. And then this is Perpetua's response. And part of the witness that the Christians gave, not just to the enemies, but also to their family who were unbelievers.

She said this, Father, said I, do you see this vase here, for example, or water pot or whatever? Yes, I do, said he. And I told him, could it be called by any other name than what it is? And he said, no.

Well, so too, I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian. All she had to say to get out of the persecution was that she's not a Christian. And her dad is trying to beg her. You know, you have a baby, you have all these things.

Just say you're not a Christian and they'll go away. And she says, no, I cannot. And that's, and when, and I'd like you to put yourself in your shoes. You have a little baby who's suckling and you have, you're just married 22 years old and you could do the lapse thing.

You know, there is a way for you to get out and come back in. Isn't my life more precious to God than, and my sons? No, I will testify to the point of death and you will see how she honors that. Let's keep going a little more.

What happens is one of her brothers also gets saved. So both Perpetua and her brother get martyred. And the other brother and the rest of the family is unbelievers. She gets baptized after she is arrested.

Her dad is very upset because he says, you're my daughter, you ought to obey me. And why are you doing this foolish thing? And he goes away. But then her pain was not really the pain of her death. She writes, I was in pain because I saw them, a family, suffering out of pity for me.

And one of the reasons was the baby. But then she petitions. It's not like, okay, you know, I'm gonna die. God will take care of my baby. I'll do whatever. That's not the way she did. She gets, petitions the prison officials.

She gets permission. She says, I got permission for my baby to stay with me in prison. And at once I recovered my health because she was suffering. Relieved as I was of my worry and anxiety over the child.

My prison had suddenly become a palace so that I wanted to be there rather than anywhere else. She knew that she was gonna be a witness and God had blessed her with this opportunity to take care of a baby until she would go on.

I'm gonna read a few more things. Dad comes back again to prison, worn with worry. And he came to see me with the idea of persuading me. Daughter, have pity on my gray head. Have pity on your father. And then he goes on to say a lot of things.

In the end, he says, give up your pride. You will destroy all of us. None of us will ever be able to speak freely again if anything happens to you. He's also concerned about himself. And he falls on her feet.

He kisses her. He does everything he can to persuade her from going down to death. And then I tried to comfort, perpetuate says, comfort him saying, it will all happen in the prisoner's dock as God wills.

For you may be sure that we are not left to ourselves but are all in his power. Now we talk about sovereignty and you can just imagine what's going through Perpetua's mind when she says this. And that was her comfort for her dad and he left in great sorrow.

The governor, and this comes to the point of the martyrdom. So she's there and then, actually no, this is the decision for the execution. He tells Perpetua, have pity on your father's gray head. Have pity on your infant son.

Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors. You're done, you can leave. All you have to do is just do this offering. I will not, I retorted. Are you a Christian? Said the governor. And I said, yes, I am.

When my father persisted in trying to dissuade me in the court, the governor ordered him to be thrown to the ground and beaten with a rod. I felt sorry for my father, just as if I myself had been beaten.

I felt sorry for his old age. But nothing she could do other than confess Christ, even in these circumstances. And then it says, we were condemned to the beast and we returned to the prison. We is not just these two women, but also the other men who were with them.

They returned to prison, dejected, in high spirits. They were rejoicing that God had ordained for them to die on the name of Christ. And then her dad keeps the baby away. She's not able to bring the baby back, but she prays and the baby doesn't need to suckle anymore, is able to be taken care of.

And she just praises God for that small blessing that God would just take care of the baby and she doesn't need to worry about the baby anymore. So as I'm saying, martyrdom is not just a one-time thing.

There's a lot of stuff that goes on. Her father doesn't leave. He loves her. Came to see me overwhelmed with sorrow. He started tearing the hairs from his beard and threw them on the ground. He does things that no Roman father would do.

He does everything within his power to say, please, just, I love you. I don't want to see you die this horrific death. Let me move on to Felicitas. She was a servant girl of Perpetua. Both of them were believers, converted, and they both go in.

Perpetua was eight months pregnant when she was arrested. And so she's in prison. And her only sorrow was that under the law, she could not be tortured when she was fully pregnant that way. So her only regret was that her brothers and sisters in Christ would be martyred first and she would have to be done later.