God's Sovereignty In Church History (part 2)

Today, we are going to be looking at God's sovereignty in church history.

Last week, we looked at some of this and we'll be completing our survey of church history up till the

Reformation and looking at how God was and is sovereign in his church.

So as before we get started, let's bow our heads in prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing us together this morning to worship you, to lift your name up on high, and to hear from you.

Even now, Lord, as we look at your hand among your people, give us, Lord, that fresh sense of your power and your sovereignty that we would stand in awe of you and,

Lord, that we would be changed by it to do our part that you called us to in your local church today.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So those of you coming in, you could probably pick up a sheet from the table for today's

Sunday school. And this is a continuation of last week's material on church history.

By way of review, we'll take a few moments to look at what we've covered. So those of you who missed it, you can get a quick tour.

And then we will spend most of our time on the second side of your sheet,

AD 1100 to 1500 today. So we started out by looking at how history of a church can be exciting, even as we look at the history of Bethlehem Bible Church and how we came through various stages.

And then we expanded our view a little bit bigger outside of the local church into the context of the universal church of God, right from the time of the apostles up until the

Reformation, which is where we're going to stop. And the pattern that we are doing here is not something new.

Right through the Bible, you see things that are written about God's sovereignty, about God's people.

And there are certain events that are recorded in the Bible specifically to show how in the events that the people of God went through,

God was moving among them. His hand was powerful with them. And that was what brought them through times of difficulty, danger, and tribulation.

The second section that you have here, the background of the Bible, we did not actually go into.

Actually, it was a homework for those of you who were here the last week. I do not know how many of you got to it. I hope some of you did.

But it just shows key events in various periods and how God was faithful even through catastrophic events in order to bring about His purposes.

So one thing we looked at was the fall. And in human standards, that's a disaster.

But it did not catch God by surprise. He knew what was happening, and He had already provided a

Savior. And then we got into church history, section three on your notes. And there are two verses that I printed out.

For those of you who have microscopes with you, you can read that. But at least the references are bolded so you can look in your

Bibles. And the first one is from Revelation 19 that looks forward to the consummation of the marriage between the

Lamb and the Bride. So we, as we look at our Bibles, can have this confidence that one day this church will be presented in fine linen, and Christ will bring about this marriage of the church to Christ.

And in Ephesians 5, we look at how God does that through the washing of the Word, and it is going to be presented without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.

And right now when we look at the church around us today, we are much discouraged at the kind of sin and the poor theology and the difficulties that it's going through, but we know that one day

God will indeed bring about this purity within the church at the end of time.

We broke down the section into three major periods. The first two we covered last week, very briefly again in review.

The first section, AD 100 to 600, we saw some key events or people.

The first one was the apostolic fathers. These were men who knew the apostles or the disciples of the apostles, and they had their writings recorded for us to have a view of what was taught or believed during the early church period.

And then we spent a considerable amount of time on persecutions. We saw how in 1 Peter, Peter had already written about the persecutions that were there and that were to come.

And this Word of God was preparing the people during these times of intense persecution that the church went through.

We saw the persecution among neighbors, coworkers that the Christians experienced.

Then we saw the local persecution, specifically that of Nero, Marcus Aurelius. And then we saw the empire -wide persecution that the

Christians faced of such a great intensity that was something that we do not have an idea of in our day and age.

Although there are parts of the world today where Christians do face intense persecution and do need to give their lives for what they believe in.

There's one thing I want to correct here, which is why I wanted to point out. Yes, last week I mentioned the lapsed and we talked about how some

Christians would deny Christ and then come back and they were called the lapsed and how they were restored.

I had mentioned Novation and Cyprian there, and I had indicated that Novation was the one who allowed the

Christians to come back into the church if they repented of their sin and proved that they were genuine

Christians. And Cyprian was the other side, and I was wrong. Cyprian was the one who actually allowed the

Christians to come back in while Novation had the other view. And actually I want to stop here for a minute from this history to just give you an example of how we must live in light of what we hear.

If you remember last week, we stopped this class with two major take -home points.

The first was God is sovereign. We cannot deny that while we look at church history. And the second was that we ought to look at one another as brothers and sisters in Christ who are weak and frail.

You know, each of us has gifts that we ought to use within the body. And we also know that we are not perfected in sanctification yet.

So when we look at a brother or sister in Christ, they're going to stumble. They're going to cause hurt. And we ought to bear with one another in love and edify one another and build one another up.

So right after class, one of the students of Church History 1 came up to me and pointed out that I had made a mistake and pointed out so gently that I didn't realize that I was being pointed out that I was making a mistake.

And you know what happens when you teach? You think about some things and those get fixed. So the whole of the previous week,

I had been thinking that Novation was the one who was right. And so when this person came and told me,

I was like, no, I know Novation is the one who did this. And then something prompted me to say,

OK, let me just open up my notes and check. So I opened my notes and the first thing I saw was Novation doesn't let the people come in.

I said, oh, maybe I haven't written it right here. Let me go back and check where I have it in detail. And I go back and check and it is wrong.

I said, oh, man, I goofed up here. And the person who came and told me said it in such gentleness that it was such a blessing for me.

And I think here, obviously, it's not a major sin, it's just a correction in facts. But even in the way we correct our brothers and sisters who are in sin, we ought to come around gently in love and do that in a way that builds that other person up and brings

God's truth in. So I just wanted to take a little detour and say, you know, that was a big blessing to me. I teach something and I see that a couple of us demonstrate it.

So other students of Church History 1 and those of you who know, I know we have some historians here. If I make a mistake, please stop me and I will correct it right here.

One other thing is last week we went very fast. So today we'll be going a little slower. And one of the saints mentioned that I was going so fast they were not able to hear everything

I was saying. So if there's something you don't understand, just lift up your hands and we'll cover that. So as a result of persecution, we saw both the blessedness of the church where God preserved his church through the persecutions.

And also we saw some problems that crept into the church during this time. We saw the apologists,

Justin Martyr, how he built bridges to the Jews and the Greeks. We saw the spread of the church in North Africa, some significant individuals there.

And then we saw heresies. And from 2 Peter, we have this warning that Peter gives, and throughout the

New Testament Paul does that several times, about false teachers who are going to come within the church. And that happens right there.

We saw some of the early heresies within the church and how God raised his men and his truth from scripture in order to preserve true doctrine.

And we saw the ecumenical councils that were held in order to develop a theology around the scriptures that they had.

And we saw the first four councils and the preservation of Christology and Trinitarian doctrine.

We also briefly saw papacy and how it developed and the reaction to the organized church, which was the monastic strain.

And although monasticism had its own flaws, how God used the monastics in preaching and spreading evangelical truth.

We spent a little time on Augustine and his views on the church, which was extremely Catholic, and his view on salvation, which was extremely reformed anachronistically.

He was very biblical in his understanding of salvation. The second period was AD 600 to 1100.

We saw some of the leaders, church leaders in England, and we started to see some of the tension that England had with Rome.

They consider themselves an island, but they were under the Pope when it came to the church. We saw

Augustine and Bede. And then we start to see the political changes under the

Franks. We saw Charles Martel and Charlemagne. Charles Martel, we didn't spend time here, but basically what happens during this period is

Islam in the 6th century and 7th century starts to creep across Africa.

All those areas where Augustine origin had brought Christian doctrine, taught the churches, are now within a span of a century totally taken over and overrun by Islam.

And it comes all the way up into Spain during this time of Charles Martel.

Again, one of the reasons why that happens is some of the churches here are very poor in doctrine. And they don't even know what they're believing anymore.

And it is just very ripe for the Islamic faith to move across. It's not always by force.

People just don't know what they believe and they hear Islam and they just move on.

But what happens politically is as the Islamic advance comes up into Spain, Charles Martel is the one who fights against the

Islamic advance and prevents it from coming into the rest of Europe as well during that period.

And we saw in Charlemagne the unholy alliance of the church and the state.

The church under the Pope forms a very strong alliance with the king.

And we see this move forward in history where the church does its things and is supported by the state in executing its schemes.

And one such thing is the Inquisition which we will see today. And then we saw the schism between the

Eastern church and the Western church and how they called each other reprobate and that Eastern church thought they were the ones who held to the truth and the

Western church thought they were. And some of the areas that they split on was on their creed and the idea of how the clergy ought to be on icons.

And with that we come into the third period and this is where we are going to spend our time this morning is

AD 1100 to 1500. We did touch upon the crusades as well, the cause for the crusades and we saw the eight different crusades and the children's crusades.

The first two were the ones that were at least successful with regards to their purpose of going and reclaiming

Jerusalem which was 500 years or so now under Islamic rule.

And in the second one they just maintained their hold. But between the second and third Saladin takes over and then all future attempts are failures.

But one thing for us to remember here is when we think of crusades we always think connected with some kind of evangelism and that somehow

God's kingdom is spreading out by force and that is wrong. And one thing that happened in Islam was they did advance their kingdom by force.

They would go, whatever land they take over had to be Islamic. And we as Christians, no matter what we do, last week we heard on evangelism, we'll be touching on that a couple of times today, we ought to spread the word by truth.

It's by the scriptures that we can evangelize. It's not by force, it's not by manipulation, it's not by trickery.

The only strength by which we ought to evangelize is by the word of God.

So with that we'll start on fresh material here, the monastics. So the monastics we saw in the first period were reacting to the organized church and they wanted to bring true worship of God individually and in communities.

And here again what happens is the monastics of the earlier period had kind of died down. They started out well, but then soon they became rich and they were enjoying their good life and everything was fine and dandy.

And God raised some men even within those places in order to bring back a fervor for truth and for a life that is after holiness and after God.

The first group that started it is the Cluniacs. The brackets that I have there don't belong to them, but the

Cistercians. The Cluniacs were the first who started it. Hildebrand, which we looked at in the second period, was one of the popes that came out of this order to reform the overall church.

And the Cluniacs were the monastic order that he came out of. The second group are the Cistercians and one of the famous, well basically the

Benedict plus silence refers to these, Benedict had certain type of rules and those kind of got carried over.

And one of the things monks do is they try to do their work better than everybody else and they added one more thing called silence in order to be a little more holier than the ones before.

So those were, as we saw last week, the faults of the monastics. But one of the persons here was Bernard of Clairvaux and for those of you who know him, the reformers had a very high view of Bernard.

The primary reason was his view of soteriology was spot on. He was very, very right when it came to salvation, how one must be saved.

So Luther, although he hated the monastics and the system and the falsehood that it brought, had a very high regard for Bernard.

And again, when we think of God's sovereignty, you can see that even in a system that is not working,

God used his men to bring and preserve the truth. Then we have the Dominicans and Franciscans and again people who had an

Augustinian view of salvation and who were very fervent for the Lord in terms of how they wanted to serve him.

And these were primarily preachers who were not just cloistered inside. They would go out two by two to different parts of their region and outside their countries in order to preach the word.

And when we think of monastics, at least when I do, because it has its own fleshly appeal in order to want to serve

God. But now when our thinking is right about it, we always think monastics are bad and they are in terms of how they corrupt the truth about following after God.

But last week, all of us heard the powerful message on evangelism. And I was thinking about my own life this past weekend, how fervent was

I in going after and preaching the word? I know of at least two situations where I just backed out because I was thinking of the right word, what

I ought to say, and then I didn't do it. By God's grace, I was able to share with at least a couple of men this week.

But these men left everything they had and their primary purpose was to go out and spread

God's word. So no matter how we dislike what they did, we ought to at least take the lesson that what

God used them for in their period and be more fervent in our obedience to God in our own days today.

The third one we have there is the heretics. There were two specific heretical groups that came up.

One was the Cathari. The Cathari, again, like the monks, they wanted to be very pure and they came up with their own man -made system of holiness.

But even more severely, the problem they had was they were dualistic and their theology was totally off base.

Their understanding of Christ and Satan and how good and evil fight each other. And they were a heretical group.

But there was another group called the Waldenses, which the Catholic Church considered heretical.

The primary reason was the person that God raised up here, Peter Waldo, wanted to go back to the

Bible. He would say that, you know, the priest can preach all they want from anything from purgatory to all the traditions of the church, but we will teach only what is there in the

Bible. So he was not an ordained priest, but he was a layman. He would just go out and preach the word.

And obviously when that happens, there is division. And so the church did not like that. And they called this group heretical because they are causing splits within the church.

And the Inquisition was formed as a result of that. Here are two heretical groups. We need to go take care of them.

And with time, the Inquisition gains momentum because, as we saw earlier, the church is now coupled with the state, and they now have the power to enforce what they want among the people that they believe in.

So with time, this picks up momentum. There is persecution, torture until a person recants or they get killed.

And that's, again, a very dark period within the church where the organized church, the so -called church, persecutes actual

Christians in the name of Christ. But is God not sovereign?

Absolutely not. God is sovereign even through these times. And you will see that these martyrs who died during this period are actually instrumental in the buildup that we will see in a few moments.

Now I want to spend very little time on this section here called scholastics.

Now is there anything wrong with studies or studying? No, there's nothing wrong with learning.

And there are three systems that came up during this period. The first one is the extreme realist or Platonic view, which was always there in the background until now, although not consciously.

And then the second group is called the moderate realist, which was Aristotelian that was discovered during this period, some of his writings, and people started getting excited about what he was saying.

And then there was the third group called the nominalist, and we'll look at some of the problems they created. But can somebody here distinguish what was a significant difference between Plato and Aristotle or their ways of thinking?

This is not a philosophy class. If you have a quick one -line difference, you could just shout it out.

Okay. In a nutshell, it's like this, Aristotle, he said, you know, he's scientific.

He wants to look at things and then put them together and then say, here is a truth that I can discover as a result of what

I see, it's scientific, modern. Plato believed in the truth that existed outside of everything that we see.

And because of that truth, we see certain things happening in a certain way. And therefore, he presupposes something in order to see them work itself out in the world that we see.

And I'm just giving a very simple definition, because it'll help us with how the theology developed during that time. And right underneath the systems, you have some of the theologians during this period.

And the first one is Anselm, and he was very Platonic in the way he thought. And Augustine was too.

Everybody else before was, except that they didn't think that they were thinking Platonically. They were just reading the scriptures as they were and interpreting them the way they ought to.

But Anselm actually does a remarkable work. There's some problems with Anselm. I'm not going to get into them, but I want to just focus on one good thing he does, which is he tries to explain the atonement during his period.

This is a time of the feudalism, where you have the king who rules and owns everything. You have the feudal lords below them that are in charge of certain lands.

And then you have the serfs below who really have nothing. And he tries to explain the atonement in terms of the feudalism, where he says, imagine that you have somebody right down in your chain who offends somebody right up there.

Now the problem is he has offended him. So he has to restore back to him his honor, but he is lower in the chain and therefore is unable to do anything that can restore that other person's honor.

So he's in a double bind. He's caused a problem, but he cannot fix it. And then he uses that imagery to explain how

Christ came, the second person of the deity, in order to do for us what we could not do, that we may be restored back to fellowship with him.

Now he does that in a language of feudalism, which takes away some of the core pointedness of the gospel.

But in terms of understanding where the problem lay and how you ought to be saved, he was very clear in terms of salvation.

The next person we have is Peter Lombard. He wrote a thing called the Book of the Sentences, which is in some senses one of the early systematic theology books.

Calvin's Institutes is based off of the structure that Peter Lombard uses. And then we have

Thomas Aquinas, and he is Aristotelian in the way he thinks. He wants to prove the existence of God.

He sees all of creation and nature, and he wants to say, just like Aristotle can look at all of scientific evidence and prove that there is something beneath it,

Aquinas does that. He is Aristotelian. He is Augustinian as far as total depravity goes.

But when it comes to salvation, he goes totally Catholic. So how do you get saved? He picks up all of the

Catholic sacraments, and he makes it into a systematic theology for Catholics, how you can be saved.

So he starts to go away from the right view of soteriology. And William of Ockham I just have here, because he is postmodern, that's what those two letters stand for, ahead of his time.

And that is the time of our land today. As you know, I saw a book by D .A.

Carson on the table on the emergent church, and that's exactly the problem that we see in those churches now, where they take the thinking of the world and apply it to the

Bible rather than using the Bible to affect the way we think. And so when we look at studies, we always ought to be careful that we do not let them change the way we think about God's word.

Because when you lose the distinction between right and wrong, you open yourself up to heresy like William did eventually, and now we start to see creeping within the church.

So when we look at systems of studies and system of theology, we need to remember that all our theology ought to come directly from the

Bible and not influenced by the philosophies of the world around us. And I have semi -Pelagian here.

As we saw in Augustine's time, we had soteriology very clearly defined, and now during this period, the understanding of salvation gets corrupted.

When we had both tradition and scripture, the weight of tradition when it comes to the understanding of the church drags down their understanding of salvation.

And then we have this group of people called the mystics. Now in scholastics, it's more of people who are thinking really hard.

They want to use their mind in understanding God and worshipping Him. And so what do the mystics do?

They say, you guys are dry. You're just thinking, thinking, thinking in your ivory towers. We need to have experience of God.

So they say, they go the other extreme. They say, I want an unmediated relationship with God.

And in some part of it, the desire for it is good that it's not just intellectual, it's a relational experience.

Christ is not just the one who died on the cross, He's the one that, He's your savior and your

Lord in your walk today. But these mystics tend to go further and further away from the truth in the sense that they start to reject the scriptures as authoritative over their life.

It is their talking with God or walking with God that is primary. And that, again, moves them away from the truth of scripture.

But not everyone, again, here is totally off base. You see that God does still preserve

His people. One of the men who goes off is Meister Eckhart. He says, you know, you look within yourself and you'll find everything you need for truth.

And on the opposite end, you have John Toller who served during the bubonic plague.

And here is a man who looked for a fiery experience with God, but that experience or his relationship or his love for God transformed the way he related to the people around him.

It was not just some mystical head in the clouds thing, but rather he went out and showed his love for the people suffering during this period.

And he had no, he had very strong words for the, for the church, which was just organized and doing all these rituals and not really having the love of God within them or showing it to the church outside or to the people outside.

Now the last three sections here are kind of tied one after the other. The first one is called the

Babylonian captivity of the church. I want you to look at this from the eyes of the people. So the so -called Christians in the church, looking at their leadership, they have this man called the

Pope that they're supposed to look up to through whom they get salvation as the church falsely teaches.

But there are still men here and there like Bernard and so forth who talk about the right way of salvation. But they're looking up to this

Pope and this man is supposedly in Italy. And then for some political reasons starts to move into France.

He's moved into France for a little period of time. And that's what's referred to as Babylonian captivity of the church, where just as Judah was carried off into Babylon, they thought the

Pope was carried off into France. But what happens as a result of this is for a period of time he's there.

This causes even more political problems between France and England, which is already fighting at this point. I like the

Pope, but I don't like France and so forth. And the Pope comes back to Italy after, after some time.

And when he comes, he dies and there's a new Pope elected. And this Pope is not liked by the

French people. So the French say, hey, you know what? We don't like your Pope. We're going to elect another one. So there's another

Pope here that's elected in France. So you have two Popes, one in France and one in Italy. Now that's not the end of the story.

What happens now is there's another group which says, oh, we have a problem we need to solve. So they meet in a town of Pisa and then they say, well, neither of these two guys are good.

So let's elect this guy as the Pope. So now you have three Popes instead of two. Now for the man on the street, he is supposed to look at Peter's successor and he has three successors all of a sudden at the same time before the previous two have died.

And you can just imagine the confusion that's going on there. And as we, yes,

Daniel, we believe so. The understanding is that both

Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome during Nero's time. But as the question would follow, where these men really, successors of Peter, was that what the

Bible intends? And as we've seen before, that was not what Christ meant when he said, thou art

Peter on succession. Which one?

Right. So there is a problem there. And then there is a group called the Conciliar Movement, which tries to fix this.

They restore some order, but it is chaos right after this. And we'll see some of that chaos.

But during this chaos, now the people are confused what's going on in the church. And then we see two men who are early reigns of the

Reformation, Wycliffe and Hus. Wycliffe in England and Hus in Germany. Wycliffe sees all the problems in the church.

He calls the priests thieves, robbers, liars. He has the strongest words for them.

He says, church and state together? That's baloney. That cannot happen. By that time,

England is already separating further from Rome. He says, the

Erastian view, or the separation of church and state, comes into view at this point. Pope hates Wycliffe, tries to get him over to kill him, but the

English people protect Wycliffe during this time. And as we know, God has his hands in preserving the work of Wycliffe.

Wycliffe then starts to translate the Latin Bible into the local English, and the word of God starts to spread among the people, and his followers take that forward.

And then comes Hus. Hus listens to what Wycliffe has to say. One thing

I forgot to mention was Wycliffe learns in Oxford, and again, he learns the right view of salvation, and that's what drives his passion for teaching.

And Hus again hears about this, the Augustinian view of salvation, and he has even stronger words in Germany.

And the king of Bohemia gives him some support to protect him from the pope, but eventually the pope kind of tells him, hey, come over,

I want to hear what you have to say, let's talk, dialogue. And Hus goes over thinking, you know, the church is going to get reformed, and the pope says, well, you need to recant.

And he says, no, I can't do that, and he's burnt at the stake, although he had assurances from the pope that he wouldn't be persecuted.

And that goes to say a lot about what the pope himself says. And so these two men, yes,

I think it's the late 1300s and the early 1400s when this happens.

Wycliffe is first, and right on the heels of him is Hus. I don't know if anybody knows. Right. So, yeah, so these are about 100 years before the

Reformation, and their primary focus at this point is not necessarily theological, but rather practical.

They just see this church as corrupt, in a state of ruin, and they start, they do have the right theology, but their main focus is, you guys are way off base, and they try to teach what is true.

Then we have the Renaissance, and the Renaissance, you can look at it from various different angles. If you look at it from the view of the world, the world gets even more worldly, secular.

But from the viewpoint of God and his church, one thing that is very, very exciting is, to me it almost compares to the time when, in King Josiah's time, the scroll was rediscovered.

If you remember, Josiah was repairing the temple. The priest, Hilkiah, I think, finds the scroll and says, we've seen this.

And then Josiah and the people, they tear their clothes saying, oh my goodness, we didn't know that these, the words of the law, and we have not kept them, woe on us and judgment.

And then God brings back healing in the land. And in a likewise, as you know until now, the

Latin Bible was what the church held tightly onto, didn't want the people to see. And at this point, the languages are learned again.

There are some changes that happen in the southern part, Italy and so forth, and some changes which happen in the northern part,

France and Germany. And I'm just going to focus on the northern part, where two men, one is

Johannes Roschlin, who rediscovers or learns Hebrew and brings that learning back into the schools so Bible scholars can know the original

Old Testament. And then we have Erasmus, who picks up Greek, and then he now teaches, he's the one who publishes the first printed copy of the

Greek New Testament. And by now, the Gutenberg Press has been there for 60 years or so.

And he does a phenomenal work collecting the various texts from different places and putting together the Greek New Testament.

And as you will see, this plays a significant role in Luther when he comes out and stands up against the

Catholic Church. And before we get to him, though, the one other problem we need to look at is the

Renaissance popes. You know, if you thought that the popes were problematic until now, you haven't seen anything until you get to the

Renaissance popes. We are looking at about five popes during this period. I've written down profligates, politicians, profane, you can add more peace to it, prodigal, anything.

You know, these guys were like the worst of the worst. They were extremely powerful, very political in terms of the way they were manipulating the system to become popes.

They killed the people they didn't like, they spent money like water, and they fleeced the church in order to fund all their feasts and their atrocities.

They were extremely immoral. I mean, you don't have a clue. I don't want to get into that at this point, because I will have to spend two more hours talking about righteousness afterwards.

But these men were so horrible, we cannot even imagine in this world, I think it would shock even the worst of the men depraved in the world today.

But they were such a horrible state of mind. So you have the church here, so -called church here, where the leaders are just totally dissipated.

And I want to stop here for just a moment. If you were a

Christian during this time, and you're looking at the church, here is the so -called church of God, with its leaders living worse than the worst sinners.

What is God doing? For those of us who are past history, it is easier because we know what happens next.

And we can always take that assurance. No matter where you are in history, where you are in your life, no matter how desperate the situation is,

God is sovereign. When I look at these Renaissance popes, one of the things that comes to mind is the land of Canaan, and the immorality that they were in, and the land spits them out, and that's just about what's going to happen when the

Reformation comes into the picture here. Luther, one of the things that causes him to go and nail the 95 thesis on the church is, there's a man who's hawking indulgences, and these indulgences were started out by one of the popes, restarted by one of the popes, because he needed more money, and so he's selling free indulgences.

And Luther is quickened. He was a monk. He starts to see the scripture, the

Romans 1 .16, the righteous shall be, actually, you know,

I do have something I want to quickly read about this. It's better coming from his own words. He says,

I greatly long to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, the justice of God, because I took it to mean that justice, that justice whereby

God is just, and deals justly in punishing the unjust. And he goes on to say that he did not love a just and angry

God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Here you can start to see how the scripture is starting to work on Luther.

And in night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that the just shall live by faith.

Then I grasped that justice of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy,

God justifies us through faith. Thereupon, I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through the open doors into paradise.

The whole of scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the justice of God had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet and sweeter love.

This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven. And you can just see how Erasmus, even though he did not intend for all of this to happen, he did his part in translating the, in bringing the

Greek New Testament into the hands of people like Luther, and God used that in bringing about a radical transformation in the church.

Luther did intend to reform the existing church, but the resulting split causes the church to spread even more and stay focused on God's word.

We are about out of time, but I want to spend a couple of minutes here to look at what this means to us.

Last week, we saw that we need to remember God's sovereignty in and through these events, and also how we ought to look at some of the lives of individuals in the church and how they stood up like Luther did just now, and how we ought to do our part that God calls us to within the church today.

Now, I had listed a couple of events that would showcase

God's sovereignty as it were, but can somebody just lift up your hands and tell me some of the things that we just looked at or things we did not look at that look, that highlight

God's sovereignty in preserving his church? Anything that comes to mind?

Yes. Absolutely.

So, both the love for languages, you know, people probably didn't even know what they were doing while they did that, but God was sovereign in ordering it.

And the printing press, who would have thought at that time, you know, how many copies can you write by hand? But God used that sovereignly at the right time in spreading his word and bringing about the

Reformation. Thank you. That's exactly right.

So, until now, there was no, if you just think of Wycliffe, for example, and how he was protected by England, although they didn't intend to uphold

God's kingdom, but they protected Wycliffe, and then you start to see how, through the nations, God sovereignly ordains his men to be preserved and to spread the word of God.

Yes. So, again, he was not trying to reform the church.

His daughter, Elizabeth, who also, for political reasons, maintains a split with the

Catholic Church, but now you have essentially Protestant England, because these Protestant reformers can rise over there and begin to, you know, try to do something about it.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it reminds me of Joseph, when he talks to his brothers later on, you know, you intended it for evil sometimes.

In Joseph's case, they intended it for evil, but God brought about a good. And here, the men in power do what is selfishly motivated, but God uses that even for His sovereign purposes.

And God is absolutely in control, even during the darkest time, because His plan and His purposes will come through.

And the second arm of this is our responsibility. What do we do as a result of this?

You know, each of us, as we saw last week, has a gift that God has sovereignly given to us. And it is our responsibility to use that in the context of the local church, in BBC, the way

God has ordained it. You know, I just want to finish with one example. When I started studies, I did not intend to study history, church history, or, you know, study it any more deeply than I had to.

History is one of the subjects you had to pass, but seriously. But when I finished it, it was an enjoyable course.

I said, great, I'm done. I don't have to look at history any more. But what happened was, we were teaching

IBS, and there was a need in the church. Somebody needed to teach history, and I was asked to do it.

And I said, sure. And I started teaching it. And today, I'm here before you doing it again in Sunday school.

And who knows what God has down the road. But my point is this, when there is a need in the church, and you are called to do it, step up to it.

Because you may not know what your calling is, what your gift is, but call where you are, serve where you are called to, and the

Lord will bless everything else from there. And that's my concluding point, which is that when we look at each other, do not expect perfection.

We are not perfect. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are not perfect. But God uses each of our gifts for His glory right here in our church.

So with that, I would like to conclude. But is there any questions before we do that? Yes, Daniel.

What textbook were you studying? That's a good point. I have Gonzales on the table, and we actually have copies for sale here, if anybody's interested.

But I have a couple. There's one other book by, yes, that's the story of Christianity. And so we have copies of this if anybody's interested in our church, and there's some more material there.

I've got some atlas and stuff if you're interested in looking at it afterwards. So the last verse we have here,

I'll just read that and then we'll close in prayer, helps us to fix our eyes on God's work in His church.

Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, that He may 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.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you a lot for this time that we can look back at your hand among your people.

Lord, I pray that you would fill us with that sense of awe in your mighty hand that is at work even in our midst today.

Preserve your people, Lord, from doctrinal error, preserve them from moral impurity.

And I pray, Lord, that your people, filled with your spirit, would do your work in your church today.

We pray that you would prepare our hearts and mind even as we get ready for the main service.

Lord, I pray that you would speak powerfully through Pastor Mike, and may our hearts,

O Lord, submit to your Word, that our lives would be conformed to your truth and glorify your name and your name alone.