Q&A--WHAT IS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH? WHERE DID THE EARLY CHURCH GO? WHAT CHURCH DID JESUS START?

And, uh, if you have your bulletin, it has four, one, two, three, four questions on it. But what I'd like to do is, uh, anybody that has a, uh, Roman Catholicism related question, if you want to ask it too. So I kind of compiled, uh, for our question and answer time, which is what we're doing this evening with open microphones, I compiled the email and hallway questions into these four. Uh, because I just commented, I don't know, I think it was last week or the week before, I said that when I'm on an airplane and I'm studying my Bible, and they ask me what I do, you know, I, I say that I'm studying the Bible, and they usually say, "I'm Catholic." And I say, "Oh, I'm Catholic, but I'm not Roman Catholic." And it always elicits a, "What's the difference?" I've never had that not happen. And which is them inviting me to explain the gospel to them, which Romanism is opposed to the gospel. And, uh, the church that Christ started is the gospel. So, uh, that's why I do it. But from that, I wrote these questions: What is the Catholic Church? When did the Roman Catholic Church begin? What is the history of Romanism? That's the Roman part of Roman Catholic, that's what Romanism is called. And the last question, what was the Reformation about? So those are the, uh, um, questions.

But does anybody have any other kind of, uh, oh, I see a question coming. Well, how about about football? You could ask one about football, right? So, uh, but, um, any, any questions? 'Cause I want to make sure I, I get everything in. Um, and say hello. My name is, then, hello, my name is Jordan Durch. Um, I was just wondering, what should our stance be towards those evangelicals who are affirming of Catholicism, or the small fragment of Catholicism, or Catholics rather, who claim salvation by grace through faith alone?

Say that again. I was a, wait, I only hear you right there. So, what should our, what should our attitude, uh, be towards those evangelicals who are affirming of Catholicism, or the small portion, um, of Cath, of Catholics who, uh, do believe or appear to believe, uh, salvation by grace alone, uh, through faith alone in Christ? Um, yeah, I think that's, hey, Les, I somehow messed up my, oh, there it is. How did I do that? I can go a third time if you need me to, Les. How did I make it small? Will it hinder what I'm doing to make it small? I guess not. I'll try and write on it, but writing doesn't work. Oh, there we go. Okay. What's our attitude toward evangelicals, um, that, uh, toward evangelicals that are for, what'd you say? That are affirming. That are affirming. Uh-huh. Of the small portion of Catholics who claim salvation by grace alone? Sounds very Christian, in other words. Um, mhm. And, and then still want to remain in the Catholic Church? I'll just add that on. Uh, well, that, yeah, you have, they want to remain. Uh, I would say the biblical question, or biblical answer to that is the same that, where'd you go, Jordan? There you are. Um, do you remember when, uh, Jesus' disciples came up to him and they said, "There's people that aren't with us." And what did Jesus say? "If they're not against us, they're for us." Right? And if they're not for us, they're against us. He said both. He said it both ways, and it has very deep meaning. And I think that that, I will answer that tonight in, uh, and if I don't, you can jump up at the end, because I've got a lot of slides to cover.

Hello, my name is, hello, my name is Lisa. And how do I explain to my very Catholic family that there is no Purgatory? Purgatory. And the short answer I would give you, Lisa, is ask them to show it to you in the Bible. I do, and they will take, well, first they'll go to the priest, and he will tell them to take you to Second Maccabees 12, I think, 24. And you go, "Did you know that Jesus did not believe that was part of the Bible?" And they will go and go back to their priest, and the priest will not know either. And they'll go to the Archbishop or something. And because Purgatory isn't in the Bible, it's, it's only in Maccabees. So then, with Purgatory, if it's not in the Bible, then it's not real. They have a bigger problem. See, that they are willing to go against the Bible and to believe a doctrine that's not in the Bible. And so then you back up and you say, instead of talking about Purgatory, then what I do with them is I spend time going over Peter's messages and Paul's messages because, because those two preach the gospel and are recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as clearly being, you know, especially Peter, the Pope. And, and I actually have a study called "The Gospel According to Peter." And it's amazing. It's interviewing Peter and say, "Peter, do you believe in Purgatory?" And what Peter said is that silver and gold, you know, we don't have silver and gold to purchase our salvation, 'cause remember they were trying to. And he says, "No, no, it's, it's only through the precious blood of Christ." And so that's one way I do it. But usually, this one, I don't want to get in a debate with him over the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. What I want to get in a discussion with him is, is there hope founded in the word of God or something else? So that's what I would do. But that's going to come up when I, I'll show you in a minute about Purgatory.

Hello, my name is, hello, my name is Brandon Morris. Um, I've heard some pretty smart Christian apologists argue that they're Catholics for the reason that the Catholics have an oral tradition that's passed down and that helps them interpret what the Bible says. The argument is that us not having the, the oral traditions, the priests and the bishops and everything coming down from Peter supposedly, that we, how, how do we know how to interpret our Bible? Like, our, our hermeneutics that strong to make up for their passed down oral tradition?

What a great question, Brandon. And what I would say to that is, number one, what that's called is, uh, uh, Corpus Magisterium. That's a big buzzword for, um, Terry, um, uh, for the Roman Catholics. Corpus, body, Magisterium, of the teaching that they have a body of teaching that has been passed down. And so with them, with those that say that, I take to First John in Chapter 2, where John says that we don't need someone to teach us, that we have an anointing, and he teaches us all things, and that's the Holy Spirit. What, what believers are supposed to do is come to the gathered church to be encouraged, to be taught, but to examine, as it says in Acts 17:11, that that we examine and and check the scriptures whether what is being taught is in the scriptures. And so what, what the scriptures tell us in 1 John 2 is we have an anointing of the Holy Spirit, um, that that teaches us all things. So we are Holy Spirit taught. And we can just us with the Holy Spirit inside of us, do what Luther did and question things because the Bible says this, and you say that that body of oral tradition passed down that only they can interpret goes against what Jesus said. He says, "You follow the laws of men rather than the laws of God." And what he interpreted is the Pharisees had their oral tradition that wasn't written down in the Bible, and he was speaking from what was written down. And so actually, Jesus answers that. And the, what, what the priests and whoever's teaching that wants to do is they want to do the same thing that the Inquisition did, uh, in taking away the Bible out of the people's language, doesn't want them to even interpret it, they want to interpret it for him. And John in First John said not to do that. And prior to that, Jesus said, "You take men's traditions above the written word of God." So it's the same as, uh, two questions ago. Do you equate the Bible with tradition? No, tradition's important. The Bible trumps it. That's a hard word to use these days, isn't it? Uh, the Bible, uh, is above it. There we have to change our vocabulary. It's kind of like gay no longer means gay, and Trump doesn't mean Trump anymore, you know. Um, but, and those two, I wasn't equating those two either, but, oh man, we're getting in trouble here. So did I say enough random before I get in trouble? But that's what I would, I would taken to First John and then to what Jesus said about the tradition of the Pharisees not being higher than the Bible.

Yeah, okay. You're a blessing. Oh, another one.

Hello, my name is, hi, my name is John. I think you've begun to answer my question, but how do you witness to relatives who grew up in the Evangelical tradition and have converted to Catholicism?

The same way I would, uh, witness to those that grew up in Evangelicalism and are pagan, lost people. Um, it's going back to the heart of the gospel. I mean, especially if they've gone from Evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism, which is what Elisabeth Elliot's brother did, to, you know, just give a current example, you know, Elisabeth, shadow of the Almighty, Elliot is from a magnificent Christian family, and her brother converted back to the Catholic Church, um, famously from an Evangelical seminary. But what do you, how do you discuss that with them? How I would do it is that means they have a real interest in the gospel and the scriptures and the church history and everything else. And I would go back and define with them what is salvation, because the heart of the issue is how we get the justifying death of Christ applied to our life, and is it applied the way the scriptures say? And the scriptures say that it was imputed to us, credited to us, or do we believe the way the Roman Catholic doctrine of oral tradition that we just heard about says that it is infused? The difference between imputation, which is what the Bible teaches, imputation, the difference between imputation and infusion is the difference between having something put into your, your credit card account and going around all your life with an IV bag. What would you think of someone that had one of those little four-wheel cart things that has a little bag hanging on it, and they had a, you know, a line, a PICC line going into their vein, and they were pushing that thing around? And that's a Roman Catholic. A Roman Catholic has to be tied by an IV bag to the Roman Catholic Church to get to Purgatory. They can't even get to heaven. They are getting in infusion drip by drip, every time they go to the Catholic church, every time they do a sacrament, they're getting more drips, more drips, more drips. And I'm going to cover this in just a second. Do they understand when they went that way that it, it is no longer confusing? In 1564, is that when Trent was about? Trent? See, you're catching me without, uh, thinking about this too long. But when the Trent, when the Council of Trent codified Roman Catholic doctrine, it's no longer possible to say that Roman Catholicism, uh, is, is biblical justification described by the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church defined in Trent this infused grace through this, the sacramental system. Before that, it was a mixed bag. You had, you had godly, born-again people in the Roman Catholic Church, and you had real rascals. But in Trent, they codified it. Now, someone can be inside the Catholic Church and say, "I disagree with Trent, and I just go for the stained glass windows." I think they're foolish to do that, but they can be saved. But if they, if they swallow that, the Bible says in Galatians 1 that they are anathema because they have added works to salvation. So it's serious. So if they're just a thinker and they like organ music and, and stained glass windows and smoke, it's okay. If they deny that, okay, okay. But I'm going to get into it in just a minute when I get into the doctrine.

Thanks, John.

Hi, my name is Brian Staler. And this has to do with a terminology. My impression is that Roman Catholic people, people of Roman Catholic faith, consider it to be Christian themselves, to be Christians. And so we have this dichotomy of Roman Catholic Christians, Protestant Christians. Is that, uh, uh, an accurate impression? And how do we resolve that?

Yeah, that is a, that is the exact thing that, in fact, that's the direction the world is going. Even in Kamuzu, there's a local pastor that is trying. I've gotten so many emails from him, and he says, "We all need to get together for the celebration of Martin Luther's, uh, you know, Wittenberg event and get all the Christians and Catholics together to tell all of Kamuzu that we're all Christians." And I wrote him back and I said, "I absolutely am opposed to your idea. You are a nice guy. Your idea is horrifically unbiblical, incorrectly wrong." Because, because there is a massive difference between Roman Catholics considering themselves to be Christians and truly born-again Christians who simply by calling on the name of the Lord get a new heart without the seven-stage sacramental system. See, most people don't understand Roman Catholic doctrine. It's, and so what they say is, "It's Christian." It's Christian, yes, in the sense it's not Hinduism, but in the sense it's biblical, it's not Christian. And, and so that's, and I'm getting, boy, you're a Brian. I don't know if you're a Y or an I, but that is a bingo question because that's exactly what we're talking about tonight. So how about at 7:00? I'm going to pause, and, and all of you that asked something, if I didn't hit it, we'll reset. Okay, thank you. Okay, that's enough because we'll never get to my 37 slides. And you can all think about your, uh, um, let me see if I can find my slides. There we go. Uh, so first of all, what does it mean to be Catholic and not Roman Catholic? And that's that is what alarmed and set off the, the email, you know, response. Uh, what does it mean to be Catholic and but not Roman Catholic? Well, I would say that I'm using "Catholic" as an adjective, not as a noun. Okay? As a noun, in English, Catholic means that you're a Roman Catholic. But if I say that I'm Catholic, and, and, you know, it is taking advantage of the English language is to precipitate them to ask, "What's the difference?" So what does it mean when I say that? Okay, well, first of all, let's just go through the dictionary. This is Catholic in the dictionary. You notice that it's, um, there's an adjective form and a noun form. Adjective, uh, is, uh, a wide variety of things, all embracing. The synonyms are universal, diverse, diversified, wide, broad, broad-based, eclectic, liberal, latitudinarian. Narrow. What I'm talking about is this Catholic in its truest sense, just like other English words like "affair" used to mean your business, now it means something different. Nowadays, it's kind of a euphemism for adultery. Uh, "gay" used to be in all the Christmas carols, "a happy gay time." Now it's a euphemism for sexual degeneracy. Okay? Do you understand that words change with cultural, you know, context? And so when I say that, I'm taking advantage of the original meaning of the word Catholic, which is the universal, the, um, let's see, relating to the historic doctrine and practice of the Western Church, and what characterizes all Christians. Uh, and of course, the, the dictionary says it's of the Roman Catholic faith, but I'll show you why I say this. Now, the noun form is what you think it is. It's, it's a Roman Catholic. Now, going back to where the word comes from, the word Catholic in English comes from, look at this, "kata holos," Greek words that mean "calicos," universal. So actually, I'm thinking of the New Testament world and the church that came out of the day of Pentecost. And it was, there was only one church that was born on the day of Pentecost. Today, there are hundreds of flavors of Christianity, and there's a lot of people that think Mormonism is Christianity, or they think, you know, some of these, uh, uh, you know, "Let's all get together against abortion." They under, the umbrella of Christianity, they'll put almost anybody as long as they're pro-life or pro-family or something like that. And so what we've done is we've kind of lost the definitiveness of of doctrine, um, through through wanting to have social power or something like that. So in the most basic sense, in the Greek language, "kata holos" or "catholicos" means universal. And so that became in Latin, "catholicus," which became Catholic in English. So that's, that's what I'm talking about. Uh, but I only say it to cause that questioning because what it does is, when I say I'm Catholic and not Roman, they immediately let down their defense shields. If I said I'm an ordained Baptist minister, they would just, they would turn in their seat, you know, and look out the window and put in their earbuds. But if I say, "I'm Catholic, but not Roman," what I'm saying is, "I'm a part of the church Jesus started, not the one you're in." They're not the same. But they don't realize I said that. And so they say to me, "What's the difference between the Catholic Church that you say you are, which is defined in the Bible, and the Roman Catholic Church that I'm a part of, that's not described in the Bible?" Well, it is, but it isn't described as the church. And so that's what I'm trying to prompt them to to talk about. Now, it's too bad. Do you know how to fix this so it gets less, wherever you are? Do you know how to make it little again? 'Cause no one will be able to see my slides. Um, too bad. I don't know enough about this, but this is really small. I'll just read it to you if we don't know how to fix it. This is a typical Roman Catholic advertisement that's on the internet, and it says, "Who started your church?" And this is St. Peter's Basilica, which is so recognizable. And they have churches and founders and years and locations, and they put themselves right there as the originators, Catholic Church. They actually should say Roman Catholic Church, but the, the Catholic Church, they're right. The, the church Jesus started was in AD 33, and it was in Jerusalem. But they, by putting their little St. Peter's Basilica at the top, are implying that in 2016, they are still this, but they're not. And I'll show you in just a moment. And then they go, I mean, this is a fascinating list. Saddleback Church, Rick Warren, 1982, Orange County. You know, what part of what church are you a part of? Uh, Calvary Chapel, Chuck Smith, 1965. Harvest Christian, '72, Greg Laurie. Four Square Gospel, Amy Semple McPherson, at the Angelus Temple. Christian Science, Mary Baker Glover, Patterson Fry, Eddie, Boston, 1879. Jehovah's Witnesses, right there. Charles T. Russell, Judge Russell, Pennsylvania. Salvation Army, William Booth. Mormons, Joseph Smith, 1830. What they're doing is, they're, they're kind of lumping together everyone except for them. And this is very common. And that's why Elisabeth Elliot's brother migrated to the Roman Catholic Church. That's why many people, even Evangelical type people, have moved to the Orthodox Church because they're trying to go to the pure form of Christianity, but they're not going to the pure form of Christianity. They're just going to the external visible manifestation of ancient Christianity, which has moved far from the scriptures, as we'll see. They end with Luther up here, uh, Martin Luther, 1517. The Anglicans, founded by Henry VIII. He did found that church. It was a Roman Catholic Church. Anglicanism was started by King Henry VIII of England. And the one thing we all remember from history, if you were listening, that you were more likely to stay alive in his court if you were a dog than one of his wives, because he had a penchant for killing them. Uh, but he did start the church so he could divorce, and, uh, 'cause Catholics wouldn't let him. But that's where Anglicans came from. Uh, its Roman Catholic English form. Calvinists, by, uh, John Calvin. Presbyterians, by John Knox, etcetera, etcetera. So that's why we need to define this. Now, basically, this is how we define it. This is a little drawing I make. It's, uh, what I say is this square is the word of God. See, Word of God, right here. It's central. Everything. And here's the early church, which grew into over the centuries the Roman Catholic Church. And this part of the Roman Catholic Church was very biblical. Actually, it's a higher percentage of that. I would say that 95% of Roman Catholicism is biblical. It's just the other 5% within the other 5% there's some deadly poison, uh, that that is deadlier than anything. It's damnable poison. It's a works religion that denies the once and for all death of Jesus Christ on the cross. And that is part of Roman Catholicism. This was codified in, in the Council of Trent. So church history started with the early church, which morphed into, uh, the Roman Catholic Church as time went on. We have the next iteration of the church, which was very biblical, but had some non-biblical parts, and that was the Reformation. And the Reformation, if, if the errors are damnable of Romanism, the errors of the Reformation would be what we would call theological drift. And you've heard me talk about this many times on Q&As, but there are things in Reformation theology that aren't in the Bible. You know, they're never mentioned in the Bible. They're logical, and they're true, but they're not biblical. And yet they become the central doctrines of Reformation theology, which is what is so fascinating that they're not in the Bible. But there is so much, the majority of Reformation theology is very biblical. The errors in Reformation theology are not damnable, they're just logical, but they're not, they're not killers, they're just dividers. Then church history goes on, and we come to what I call the, the Evangelical Church. Now, remember, the, the Reformation retained a lot of that covenantal, which is a real danger, that that people are saved because they're in families that go to church, and that the parents are members, and the kids just have to be confirmed. And what happens after a few generations is you have confirmed people that are lost. See, that's what happens. That, if you have a non-evangelical church, an Evangelical Church is, you were born lost, a pagan on your way to hell, and you need to be born again. Which doesn't that sound very similar to Jesus, to Paul, to Peter? That's what they all preached. They all looked at crowds, to the people that thought they were in the Covenant Jews, and said, "You have to be born again." And the people got angry, and they say, "We don't, we're Abraham's seed." Jesus said, "No, I can make Abraham's seed out of rocks. You need to repent and be born again." Well, the reformers, sadly, retained elements of Old Testament Israel. You see it with all the Sabbath observance and law observance that shows up in the Reformed faith. But another thing is that they're in the covenant, kind of like the Jews were circumcised. You get baptized as an infant. You see infant circumcision in Judaism became infant baptism in Reformation theology. It's one of the glaring errors that Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli left in their theology from Romanism. They were all Roman Catholics that came out of the church, but they brought, dragged with them some of the baggage of the church. And so that's over here. The infant baptism and the covenantal elements are theological drift, and they're, they're incorrect, they're unbiblical. Well, we have the Evangelical Church. And the Evangelical Church, basically, I mean, this is kind of like, uh, the, the, just to put faces with it, it would be D.L. Moody and, you know, the missions movement, and, um, Baptists today, and Billy Graham. I mean, you know, that kind of people. They're not Reformed, but they're believers. They're evangelicals, and they believe that you must call people to salvation. Well, sadly, there's a percentage, just like there's a portion of Roman Catholicism that's not biblical. See, remember this is the Bible. Roman Catholicism built on the Bible with horrific, poisonous additions. Reformation theology built on the Bible with some theological drift and baggage. Evangelical theology built on the Bible with a lot of traditions that aren't in the Bible. There are many of them. How about Sunday school? I mean, the Baptists act like Jesus started Sunday school. He did not. The early church didn't have Sunday school until the year 1789, same time as our Constitution was ratified in America, and Robert Raikes in England started Sunday school. There was no Sunday school before that. It's, it's, and, and people gauge churches on whether they have Sunday school or they have evening services. Actually, the church started with evening services, not morning services. We've made the icon morning services. And when someone has an evening, like Saturday night, we wonder, "Oh man, are they doing something wrong?" We are prone to a lot of personality-driven traditions, and we have to always be carefully checking what we believe against the scriptures. Did you know the longer you talk about something, the clearer it should be if it's true? And, and so anytime it's hasty, or anytime it's, it becomes, you know, fighting, uh, it's not from the Lord. The longer you look at truth, the clearer it becomes. And so it's very good to always be weeding out what the, uh, additions are. But, uh, one error that could be in Evangelicalism is decisionism. You know what that is? Yeah. I already did that. I prayed that. Not saying, "Have you been regenerated? Have you got a new heart?" I'm talking about salvation. See, see, with, with the Roman Catholics, they say if you're baptized as an infant, you're in. With the covenant theology, they say if you're baptized as an infant, you're, you know, you're in the covenant. Do you know what, what our problem is? We have gotten kind of like that by saying, "If you raised your hand or followed me and prayed that prayer, you're in." It doesn't mean necessarily you're in, because there are many that say, "Lord, Lord," Matthew 7, that aren't saved. The proof is whether you have a transformation on the inside and want to from the heart do the will of your Father in Heaven. Jesus said so. We have the tradition, even of decisionism, or whatever you want to call it, that people all the time say, "Oh, I've done that." I say, "Uh-uh, you've done that, but what has God done? Has he given you a new heart? Has he given you a new spirit? Has he taken away your stony heart? Has he given you a heart that is responsive? Has he put his Spirit within you? Do you long to do his will? Do you hate sin?" Those are all the, the, the evidences of salvation, the vital signs. It's kind of like, you know, how when people are on big accidents, they run around and check their pulse and for breathing, you know, and all that. What are the vital signs of salvation? One of them is that you had a beginning, because it is a new birth. But, but if you've just made a decision, and there's been no change, then what Paul said in Second Corinthians 13:5 is, "Examine yourself whether you're in the faith," because we need to do a self-examination whether we see God at work completely changing us from the inside out. And then you, you say, "Wow, there's another circle here." Yeah, this is what theologians call the renewal, uh, or the charismatic movement. And did you know we have to be very cautious about that? There's some people that that almost think charismatics are like morons, you know, they're not saved yet. The v, v, majority of the charismatic renewal movement is biblical. They just have have added these excessive things, you know, an excessive emotionalism, an excessive, uh, wanting some confirmation by, by, you know, being able to speak in tongues. You know, speaking in tongues really is supernatural. If a, if a person is empowered by God to speak a language they never learned, and they are so articulate instantaneously in that language that they can actually communicate the gospel, that is a marvelous spiritual gift. You don't really see that anymore. You see, you see a learned, patterned, uh, very, very few syllable kind of a, a, a prayer language or whatever called. That's wonderful. That's a sign of having a heart for God. That's not the spiritual gift of Pentecost or of Acts 2 or even of 1 Corinthians 12-14. That was a speaking in a language that someone else was gifted to interpret, and it was only for a sign, Paul said, to Israel, showing that that people that were not Jews were going to hear the gospel, and they were going to come to Christ, as it was promised in Isaiah. And so this whole notion of this excessive looking for confirmation, and, and look what it spawned. I mean, does anybody really want to lay claim to some of the wackos that are riding around in their jets and raising multi-million dollars and getting in trouble with the IRS and claiming to heal people that, that they're selective and who they heal? When Peter and Paul walked, their shadow, cross sick people, they got well. These people have carefully orchestrated workers in the back that weed out the people that they don't want coming on the stage for them to slay in the spirit and heal. I mean, have him go to Shriner's Hospital to a completely deformed burn victim and heal him. That's the level of New Testament healing, which Paul didn't have at the end, you know, that Paul never had miraculous powers after 59 AD recorded in the Bible, and he lived for almost a decade after that. He couldn't heal his best friend and son in the faith, Timothy, and he wanted to, but he couldn't. So they're off the page with the gifts. They're, I mean, they're, they're not, they're off the page of the scriptures with their longing. It's almost like the Bible isn't enough, and the indwelling Spirit isn't enough. "I want more." And that's a real dangerous thing because if you want more, the devil will give it to you. And there are many people that speak in tongues that are not Christians. Tibetans, you know, tribal people. Satan will counterfeit anything. Whenever you get away from the Bible, whenever you're outside the box, you and I are fair game for the deceiver. And what did Jesus say is the primary thing that's going to mark? The further we get to the end of the age, deception, deception. And, and so that's why doctrine does matter. And the Reformation was a doctrinal reset from the errors that we're going to see in a moment.

So basically, uh, here's a, you can't see this, but it's just for me to see so I can talk about it. Uh, this is the history of the church. Uh, and, and one of the, there are several big points on here that are important. This is the Council of Nicaea, and we divide theologians as, uh, Nicaean and anti-Nicaean, so, or post-Nicaean. So the, those before Nicaea and after Nicaea. You might have heard that it was in 325 AD. This is an important thing. This is Diocletian, and Diocletian, uh, had the strongest persecution of the church. This is kind of what started the Roman Catholic Church, these huge persecutions right here that lasted 10 years. And, and what Diocletian, by the way, he's the only Roman emperor that retired. All the rest of them died either in battle or of living too high on the hog, uh, and drinking out of all those lead vessels and getting lead poisoning. But he was such an amazing man that after he had fixed the whole Roman Empire, he retired to his own little city he built for himself that's down in modern, you know, um, Tyrrhenian Sea, Adriatic area. That's a beautiful place that people go to. But Diocletian did three things before he quit. He destroyed every Bible. There is not one complete copy of the Bible left that predates him. He destroyed every one of them. He is methodical. We have pieces of all of them because the people tore them up and distributed them into, that's why we have 25,000 manuscript portions. But he went through and systematically destroyed. There is not a complete copy of God's word that predates Diocletian. The second thing is he destroyed, uh, every known leader. He killed or imprisoned or whatever, every pastor, and every place that the church met, he destroyed. That was his 10-year purge. Bibles, pastors, buildings. And he was the most efficient. He almost was able to extinguish Christianity. But what happened was he killed all the leaders, got rid of the Bibles, and destroyed their buildings, and they multiplied. And they started like the guys that were preaching, I told you about this morning, out of the, out of the little cage before they were burned at the stake, the martyrs were sharing the gospel and their hope. And what Diocletian did is he just retired 'cause he couldn't, he couldn't stop Christianity. And so following him comes, uh, Constantine, right here, who legalized Christianity. And I could tell you lots of other stuff, but we don't have time tonight. So basically, we have within the word of God, remember the Bible, uh, we have the Roman Catholic Church that has added works, which, which is very dangerous. We, we have the Reformation that we have to guard against this drift and also the sloppiness of pulling in some of the Roman Catholic infant baptism and, and covenantal ideas, uh, that that they came in. And then we have this whole Evangelical Church that has a tradition and almost a dangerous view of non-regenerating decisionism, kind of like a child has nothing to do with their circumcision. And so you, you can actually be in the covenant without your own decision, that it just happens by your family, or that you just pray a prayer and God has to save you. It's amazing what, what comes of this. So there are always dangers in every group. Then there's the excess side of the renewal, charismatic group. Even the early church had portions that were unbiblical. That's why Paul wrote all those epistles. The church was practicing stuff. So see, there is some tolerance within the Lord's mercy and grace for us to not be exactly right. By the way, some people, no one asks this, but where's Calvary Bible Church? Are we, you know, here or here or here or here? We are right there. How do you like that? Right inside the Bible. Right? Just teasing. Uh, even Calvary Bible Church would be, we would have a portion of what we believe totally biblical, and we have other stuff that we just do it because we want to, or we like it, or it's a tradition, and it's not really tied directly to the scriptures. There's nothing wrong with that as long as the part there isn't either presented as biblical, defended as biblical, or it's harmful. And so that's why we have wonderful elders who do examine that. And by the way, the Arminian and the Augustinian Calvinistic part are both presented in the Bible. Arminius did not get his ideas out of the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons or the Gnostics. Every one of his points that were countered, you know, at Dort, the whole conflict between Arminianism and Calvinism, both flow from the scriptures, just a different way of looking at the same scriptures. Um, and I'm not going to get into that. We've gotten into that so many times. So we've already seen this. So real quickly, how do we get where we are? Well, the first, there was Judaism. Then Christ came, and he started what people would call the one Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. Now, that those words mean a lot of different stuff nowadays. There are Apostolic, you know, charismatic churches, and, and they, Apostolic, Abian Orthodox churches. And so what I mean by that is Jesus ordained a group of apostles who started the church. That was one church that was built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets. So Jesus started that. And, and what Paul calls in Romans 9-11, we were grafted into the stump that was Judaism, Israel. They were the olive stump that that God temporarily set aside and were grafted in. But he says, "Don't, don't get all proud about that, because God is going to return." Acts 15 says, "and rebuild Israel." And so that's, that's coming. But that's prophecy, and I'm not going to talk about that. Um, so here's the church that, that Jesus started and, and built on, you know, the, the Old Testament people of God, and then the, the apostolic time, and the day of Pentecost. And immediately, early on, the Armenians broke off. That's one of the oldest Christian groups. Ar, not Armenians, Armenians. They live, they're the ones in the genocide in Turkey. They moved up to Turkey. These Christians moved to Egypt, the Copts. And then the church chugged along till 1054 AD with the Great Schism. And it was over the filioque, which they added in the church doctrines that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. And the Orthodox didn't like adding that. And so, plus they had a, they felt the Orthodox felt the priests could be married, and the Roman Catholic Church didn't want them to be married. They had a celibate priesthood, and lots of other things. The Roman Church wanted to have images, and the Orthodox Church wanted to have icons, which are two-dimensional kind of relief drawings or, or relief, you know, pictures that are raised. That's Orthodox. But full rounded images is Roman Catholic. So they divided on that, and there's the Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox are the main evidences of that. The Roman Catholic Church went on and is to this day, you know, over there. The Roman Catholics in 1517, Luther split into Lutheranism. Calvin into the Reformed. Ulrich Zwingli into the radical reformers, from which we get the Hutterites, the Mennonites, the Brethren, the Amish are downstream from that. And in the Lutherans, uh, you know, the Moravians, if you've heard of them, the Covenant Church, the Free Church, Baptist General Conferences, Reformed, you know, kind of over there Baptist side, the, the Quakers, other Baptists, the Congregational Church, ooh, the Universalists, the Unitarians. They actually come from Reformation. The, the Unitarian Church started in Prague from heavy duty Reformed over unbiblical, you know, drifting. It, it actually is downstream. The, the Unitarian Universalists are downstream from the Reformation, sadly. The Christian Reformed, all around us, Presbyterians, start by John Knox. Then the, the Anglican Church, which is the, the British form of Catholicism, and the Anglican Church in America is called the Episcopal Church. So Episcopalians are British Catholics, and they're having talks all the time to reunite with the Roman Catholic Church, as are the Orthodox, and all the others, as are the, the Evangelical pastors of Kamuzu, sadly, talking about that. The Anglicans broke in through the Wesley into the Methodists, and from the Methodists come the Assemblies of God, the Holiness Church, and all that. And upstream from that would be the charismatics up here, which are Arminian, and which are from the flavor of the Methodists there. So basically, we have Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Reformed, Lutheran, and all these split groups that that basically, you know, like the Mennonites and the Amish and the Brethren and the Close Brethren and all those that they're the German kind of segment that went with Zwingli. So that's kind of a way of looking at the church like a tree. Uh, another way to look at it is just that the church was, uh, basically as Christ started it until the time of Constantine, and then it began to to morph by 1054, right here, into the Orthodox Church, who lays claim to their the pure church, and the Roman Catholic Church, which lays claim they're the true church. But the offshoots are Luther, right here, and then Zwingli and the Anabaptists and the Baptists and the German Baptists and the Adventists. And out of the Adventists come the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Primitive Baptists. So those are all downstream from Zwingli. Uh, and the Amish and Mennonites with Menno Simons, and the Amish, sure, right there. Then Calvin in 1530 broke off with the Reformed churches, the Dutch Reformed, the Reformed Churches of America, and from them the Restoration churches, the Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the regular Church of Christ. The French Huguenots came off of Calvin too. Then we have John Knox, who took Calvin to Scotland and became the Presbyterians, and the Presbyterians had different iterations. Uh, and down here with Cranmer and the Church of England, and they grow into the Pilgrims, like in Thanksgiving, the Quakers, the Church of England, you know, goes on in its form. The Congregationalists, which broke off of the Church of England, became the Unitarians, and became all these, you know, Christian Sciences, downstream from the Congregationalists, and then the Unitarian Universalists, which is all a mess. And then out of the Church of England came the Wesley, and from the Church of England came the Episcopalians, and the Wesleyans became the Methodists, which became the Salvation Army, the United Methodist Church of today, the Pentecostal movement, and the Azusa Street Revival. All of the charismatics are down here, the AG, Assemblies of God, the Four Square, Amy Semple McPherson. And then broke off down here in 1908 is the Church of the Nazarene. So basically, you know, here's what Christ started and the apostles that morphed into the Catholic, and then split off into the Orthodox. And then the Roman Catholic Church has gone into all these divergent streams. Here's another way of looking at it. The Roman Empire pre-Christianity begins right here, and the cross and Christian church becomes the Western Catholic Church as in Rome, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, kind of what you've already seen. And, you know, we could talk more history until you're tired of history. Here's the US News and World Report cover from 25 years ago, and this was the cover, and it's called "The Lord's House." And they were trying to on the cover of a magazine describe Christianity. And I blew it up. Here's the day of Pentecost, the Holy Catholic Church. Then from the Holy Catholic Church, the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic are two streams. So US News and World Report got that pretty right. And then from that, the Anabaptists, the Amish, Mennonite, and normal Baptists, the Reformed churches, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and then the German segments, which, all of their iterations. Then from the Catholic Church came the Church of England, the Quakers, the Methodists, the Pentecostal, the African Zion Episcopal Methodists, and the plain Episcopalians. And so that's Time Magazine's take on church history, which isn't too bad. Here's another view, but this one is how the Orthodox look at themselves, you know, the Russian and the Greek Orthodox. And basically, the one church that Christ started, here's the day of Pentecost, 33 AD. Peter and Paul martyred, 64. Justin Martyr, an early Christian apologist, 150. Then we have the councils, the church councils, which if you look in the back of our hymn books, some of this stuff is in there if you ever look at the hymn books. Uh, the first ecumenical council was Nicaea, where they defeated Arianism, which is Jehovah's Witnessism. Arians believed that that Jesus wasn't God, he was a created being. I mean, Mormonism is, is old. It goes back, and so does Jehovah's Witnesses, and it goes right back to the beginning. The first problem the church had was combating this error of the deity of Christ. And then, uh, Carthage, where they met to to agree on what the church had already believed about the Bible, the canon of the Bible. Then Chalcedon, the Chalcedonian Creed, which is so beautiful, talking about the, the deity of Christ. Then they had the next conference was on that filioque addition, which caused this, um, this, this split between Romanism and the Orthodox Church because of the after-effects of this council. Um, then they started going bad. By 787, they approved icons. You know, the, the schism here started where the Eastern Orthodox Church had married priests, and the Roman Catholic had celibate priests. And you all know the story. Here's where the Crusades are. Right after the schism, the Crusades emanated from, of course, the four, uh, major countries of Europe. And, uh, by the way, way back here, the, the Nestorians, that was the first major heresy that started a denomination, the Churches of the East. And then the Oriental churches, the Copts and the Syrians and the Armenians and all those, those, those broke off too. Here goes the Roman Catholic Church into Lutheranism, Reformation, uh, you know, Zwingli and the all that. And then there's even an Old Catholic Church that broke from the New Catholic Church, you know, when they stopped the Latin and all that. But this is the Orthodox Church, which, uh, even today, uh, is attracting many Christians because they claim to be the original version. So that's another way of looking at the same thing. Uh, I won't even go through this. This is how all the, the, uh, Reformed churches, you know, the Netherlands, the Dutch, and this and this and this, and you can read all that. It's just common knowledge and history. It's fascinating how how they followed, uh, different nationalities. The Germans primarily were Lutheran, as in the Lutheranism today. The Swiss, French followed Calvin and Basel, uh, in this, the Reformed, Presbyterian, and,

The Scottish Presbyterian, the Dutch Reformed American, and then the Swiss Germans under Zwingli, um, they, they contributed to that. And the Brethren Church, Church, uh, through Menno Simons and Anabaptists, that started the Amish people and the Hutterites and all that. And then, of course, Henry VIII and, uh, Cranmer started the English Episcopal, which was Anglican, then Episcopal in America. So, again, how much these flow from, uh, the national rivalries of Europe?

Another way of looking at it is Protestant churches are the Lutherans with Martin Luther, and then John Calvin started the Reformed from him. An, an, uh, reformer, Zwingli, who always rode around with his sword, he was quite a fighter, and John Calvin, who was really into Geneva and the, the, you know, um, reinstituting the law there, um, and was a great expositor, which broke into the Presbyterians, the Scottish, uh, into the Congregationalists, from which came the Unitarians, and then the Anglican branch, which you've already seen, uh, which so affects us to this day, again, coming from that.

Another way of looking at it is that Christ was crucified, and this is what we're going to get to. In 313, *Religio Lita*, Constantine declared that Christianity was legal. Up until that time, it was illegal, punishable by death in the arena, at the stake, you know, or whatever means they wanted to use, push him off the cliff. And so we had a genuine church. This is what we call the, the early church, the Christian church. You can call it the Catholic, you can call it the universal, you can call it the early form, the biblical church. But something happened after this date. And what happened is, and, and I have a chart for you right here, is that Constantine merged the biblical churches with paganism. Have you ever wondered where robes and beads and candles and Lent and popes and Pontifex Maximus and all the stuff they wear, where did all that come from? I don't read any of that in the Bible. It came right there with the legalization of Christianity. Constantine had a problem. He had tens of thousands of pagan religious on the payroll, priests, and he legalized and makes the emperor's or the empire's religion Christianity. You remember he had a dream and he saw a shield and had a cross on it, and a voice said to him in Latin, as if God speaks Latin, "In hoc signo vinces," in this sign conquer. And he was going to the Milvian Bridge. He was going to face the battle of his life. He had this dream, and so he had them all paint crosses on their, on their shields, and they went into battle and won. And that was the sign, make Christianity legal, cross. And he did. But he had to do something with all the thousands of pagan priests. So he said, "We'll just make a, a Roman," that's the Pagan Rome Pantheon, "Catholic," that's the original Church of Jesus Christ, "Church," and merge. And instantly, Christianity became institutionalized. And, uh, what that looks like is right here. This is the church Christ started, by the way. This is, this is my favorite chart when I taught. This is from the Master's Seminary when I taught church history. The split between Roman Catholicism and Christ. And basically, the church Jesus Christ continued until a series of hard left turns that the Roman Church made. The first being Purgatory, 593. Purgatory and the first Pope in 590. And you can see it bigger here, 593, Purgatory, and the first real Pope. There were other pastors of Rome, but Gregory I first called himself the Pope. And then the temporal powers that, that the church could grant temporal powers. Um, then there's a whole bunch of stuff, uh, uh, that doesn't matter. The, uh, money for masses started in the 12th century. Indulgences for sale, that you could buy someone's, you could buy merit to spring Aunt Zelda out of Purgatory, started in the 12th century. And here's the worst one: the dogma of the Mass began in 1215. And that's where it was stated that if a priest would go in, intone these words, "Hoc est corpus meum," if he did that with a normal piece of bread and said in Latin, "Hoc est corpus meum," which in Latin is, "Hoc," this, "est," is, "corpus," body, "meum," my. This is my body. If he would say in Latin, with a normal piece of bread, "This is my body," only he had to say it in Latin, "Hoc est corpus meum." It changed from bread into the body of Christ before your very eyes. What does "Hoc est corpus meum" sound like? Yeah, that's where the term "Hocus Pocus" came from. It came from people that didn't speak Latin that saw a man wearing a funny outfit go, "Hoc est corpus meum," and changed what they knew was bread into the very body of Christ. They said, "He's doing hocus pocus." Isn't it funny how all this stuff comes into our culture that started right here? That was the, the stake in the heart of the church. And so, um, then it goes on, and I'll have to pick up here next week because I don't want to rush through it. The slide gets even worse after the Mass starts. But if you notice, the church was pretty, pretty much, uh, uh, you know, biblical with all of our problems until the 6th century. And then the slide keeps getting worse. And I haven't put all of them in. But in 1950, the church declared that Mary was bodily assumed to Heaven. She was in a perpetual sleep from the first century, and all of a sudden her body to Heaven, just because the Pope said it in 1950. Wow, that's amazing. But I better stop because it's time to go. Let's all stand. Sorry, I didn't get any follow-up questions. We'll pick this up, Lord willing, next week. Uh, you're in seminary. This is exactly what I taught at the Master's College and Seminary, and it's so fascinating when we get into what all this means, especially when we look at what is Romanism biblically, and why is it poisonous, and what's the difference between imputation and infusion? It's really good to understand that because we're surrounded by 40, 50, 60 million people in our own country who say they're Christians, but they believe that their Christianity is through an IV bag that they're connected to their whole life, that only gets them to Purgatory, not to heaven. And they're dependent on their friends and family buying candles to get them out of there. Isn't that amazing that anybody would allow that to go on one more day? If the Pope was the Pope, he should just clear out Purgatory. He has the treasury of merit. He could do it tonight. But it's a system that has to be maintained. That's not in the Bible.

So, let's, we are going to continue, uh, do one little segment of, uh, last Sunday night's question and answer. And I got so many emails, uh, from people, and they said, "Now, our families coming, don't bore them." And I said, "I won't bore them at all." Basically, what happened is, uh, about four weeks ago, I mentioned that next year is the 500-year celebration of the Reformation. And then I talked about the fact of what the Reformation stands for. And then I talked about what Protestant means. Actually, it used to be Protestant, uh, that the Protestants protested the errors of Romanism but defended the truths of the Holy Catholic Church. So I just commented on that in church and said that, um, when I sit on airplanes and I'm studying my Bible, and people lean over and say, "What are you doing?" I say, "I'm studying the Bible." And they say, "Why?" And they say, "I," they ask me why, and I say, "Because I teach the Bible." And they usually say, "I'm Roman Catholic." And I go, "Oh, well, I'm Catholic, but not Roman." And that immediately prompts them to say, "What's the difference?" And so I just said that and got a, just a barrage of emails, and they said, "Would you explain that?" So what I'm going to do for you tonight is just for the next 21 minutes, um, talk about the difference. It comes down to how did, does God compute the cost and payment for sin? All of us, well, almost all of us, almost everybody in America, if you pin them down and talk to them, we'll say, if you ask them bluntly and directly, "Have you ever sinned?" Most of them will say, "Yes." You know, I don't, I know few people that would deny ever doing anything wrong, making mistakes, telling a lie, you know, being proud, maybe in a momentary lapse, you know, or some other form of what they would call sin. And so how does God compute sin, the cost and payments for sin? Fit into church history? Because church history is all about how the church has defined the payment for sin. And what does the plan of salvation have to do with that? How do we see in salvation what God says the way he computes sin? And God is always, always computing accurately because that's why he's God. And so how does God, who sees, measures, records, keeps track of, and never forgets any sin, knowing the cost that is constantly building up? And then how do we contrast between the two major ways that church history has dealt with this? The church has said either we work on human achievement. In fact, all religions say that human achievement is kind of the scales, the balance thing, that every time you sin, it's, it's weighing you down, but you try harder, and you do good works, and you achieve them, and you try to balance the scales. That's one side of religion. The other side is basically what the Reformation was about: divine accomplishment, that Jesus paid it all, and there's no addition, no help needed on my part, uh, no weighing of the scales. The scales is like this: I'm guilty, and there's nothing I can do. The Bible, in fact, God says all of our righteous deeds are like dirty leper rags. Lepers had sores, and they would bind themselves as they oozed and had all these infections, and they would wrap cloth around them, and when they would turn green with mold, they'd throw them on the road. And if you saw one of those things, you'd go as far away from it, you didn't want to get leprosy, and it smelt. And, and God says all of our efforts at our human achievements are like dirty, oozing, molded, smelly rags. So how does that all fit? Well, basically, three scriptures. Titus 3:5, you don't have to turn there. It says, "Not by works of righteousness," balancing the scales that we have done, "but according to God's mercy he saved us by washing regeneration, renewing of the Holy Spirit." This other one here on this side, Hebrews says that, oh, come on, don't do that. I turned my board by touching it. Well, um, I did that last week. I, oh, there we go. Hebrews 10, it doesn't like fingers, it only likes pens. Hebrews 10:10 says, "By one sacrifice forever God has redeemed all who come to him." So that one man, Jesus Christ, died and made the sacrifice. But this is, if you have a Bible, and there is one in the pew in front of you, if you want to look at it, in Matthew 7, Jesus explains it all. The difference between all religions. And basically, this is what he says in Matthew 7, starting in verse 13, and I will be reading along and commenting. It says, "Enter by the narrow gate." So what Jesus says is, uh, that there are basically two roads that are entered by a narrow gate. And wide is a gate that, and broad is a way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go that way. But narrow is the gate and difficult is the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it. So there are two roads in life, uh, entered by two gates, basically, uh, um, the, there's the broad road, and the broad road has the, the big gate, and there's a narrow road, and it has the little gate. And this one leads to life, and this one leads to destruction and death. But then he goes on, verse 15, "Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruit." So now Jesus says there's two kinds of trees. What's really interesting, Jesus is very black and white. That's fascinating. He doesn't say there are many roads, make sure you try and stay as long as you can on some of the good ones. He just said there's two. There's a wrong one and a right road, a road that leads to destruction, a road that leads to life. He just directly just makes no, there's no shades with him. No, right, wrong, good tree, bad tree. And then he says, "Even so," verse 17, "a good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down." So he has the broad road that leads to destruction, then he has the, the, the fruitless tree that gets cut down. So, I mean, it's negative. Then he has the good tree that, you know, bears fruit, and it's fruitful, and that is parallel with the way to life and the narrow road. But then he doesn't stop there. Then he starts in verse 21. He says, "Everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will, will not enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will." There's two relationships with him, either the one that does the will of his Father in heaven, or those that don't. He says, in verse 22, "Many will say unto me in that day, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? Have we not cast out demons in your name? Haven't we done wonderful things in your name?" And I will declare to them, "I never knew you. Depart from me." Now, all of these again come down to two destinies: life, death. Two trees: bad fruit or no fruit, good fruit, life. Two roads: the one that's the broad road that's going to destruction, the narrow road that is headed to life. So basically, what we could do is make a very hard-to-read chart like that, and that's everything I just said: wide, narrow, death, life, many, few, human achievement, divine accomplishment. But so that we can see it better, if this will work, I better not try that. There we go. Let's, let's get it bigger. There's a wide road and a gate that leads to it. And that wide road is the way we were born on it. It's my destination. It was surrounded by many people. I trust in human achievement. I believe salvation is by me weighing, you know, the balance. And it's part of all religions. In fact, if you study the commonality of all world religions, they all have this, this idea that you have to either follow the Five Pillars, or you have to, you know, be purged through reincarnation. And it's very much about how much you do that balances you out. And most people are like this. And God says that those that follow the wide road, that is part of all religions, are headed toward death. But the narrow road and the narrow gate, the destination is eternal life, and few there be that find it. And I, and this is what Martin Luther nailed on the church door. I rest in what God did, not me trying to pray more, do more, try harder, you know, deny my flesh a little more. Remember, Luther used to lay on the ground in the winter in his monastic cell and nearly froze to death and died because he was trying to kill his flesh. And the only thing he was doing is ruining his health until the Augustinian friar came to him and said, "Martin, read the scriptures." And he read them, and he found out that the scriptures are all about what Christ did, and that salvation is by the grace of God, and the only part I play is believing that. Now, the result of that will be good works, but the initial entrance in has nothing to do with good works, and it's only by God's revelation. The, the other half of the chart says this: I was born following that way of human achievement and trying my hardest. I, I don't have to do anything other than act the way I was started into this world. I am self-centered. I'm going to try my hardest, and I'm going to think that I can do enough. And if, if I follow that road, I will pay in full for my sins because, remember, God computes and keeps track. He hasn't missed a single word I've ever said, a single thought I've ever had, a single deed I've ever done, a single attitude that I have had that no one else knows about. He keeps track, and there is a price to pay for every sin. God doesn't say, "Ah, it's okay, forget it." He can't forget anything. Everything has to be reconciled. If I do nothing, if I go with the flow, the way I was born, if I end up that way, I will be thrown in the Lake of Fire. That's what Jesus said. The other side, the narrow way, I have to be born a second time. This is just coming to planet Earth. I am headed to destruction. But the new birth, being born again, being saved, being regenerated, gets me on the new way. I have to repent to get here. It's a conscious choice to renounce the way I was born, to renounce the old way, to renounce the broadway, the human achievement way. My sins are paid in full by another, and I have no pride in what I have done. I simply trust, cling, thank, and offer my gratitude to the one who paid in full the bill. It's kind of like, you ever take somebody out to dinner and, uh, I mean, it's worse, the more expensive the meal is, and they try and give you money. I mean, it's nice if you go to McDonald's and they give you a $20, you'll come out ahead. But what if you go to a really nice place that cost $100 and they offer you a dollar? That's an insult. So it's better not to pay than to offer to pay if you don't pay, you know, a significant amount. When we try and work our way, we have such an immense, uncountable cost of our sins. When we try and do our works, it's offensive to God. He says, "No, it's not by any works. They're like filthy rags." So how does a person in Christ, Matthew 7, uh, scenario, get saved? You have to listen to God's word. So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. You must call on the name of the Lord. That's what it says. It says it in the Old Testament, says it in the New Testament. Paul, when he reiterates salvation, he says, "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord." Then, as Jesus started his ministry, Jesus is the chief advocate of repentance. Jesus said, "You were born going that way. You must repent and go the opposite way." And that repentance is a change in my mind when all of a sudden I believe God and I say, "Whoa, that's the wrong direction." And in my mind, I say, "I want to go your direction," which leads to a change in behavior. Then by faith, I get forever forgiven, and I know that I'll never be condemned for my sins. So basically, that's how Jesus describes salvation: wide road versus narrow road, heading toward death as opposed to heading to life. This is where almost everybody on Earth is going. They're all involved in trying their hardest by human achievement. But few that trust in the one who died in their place. They say, "I can't earn it with my own works. I have to trust God's gracious offering by faith." They are no longer part of religion. They are followers of God's revelation because this came directly down. It's so unhuman, it's divine. This message that Jesus did it all. Those who trust him are born again. Those who are never born a second time keep following their old ways. The, the default setting is destruction. If you do nothing, you keep going on that path. But if you repent, you get onto this narrow way. I have to pay in full. In fact, why would Jesus say people are destined for eternity and hell? Because that's how long it takes to pay for your own sin. A lifetime of sin takes forever to repay to God because it's irrepayable. It is impossible to pay it. So it must either be paid in full by Christ, or paid in full by me. And people don't end up in hell. Jesus said they're thrown there. They're thrown there in front of the throne of God as an angel looks to see whether or not they have repented, been born again, and accepted the payment by Christ. And that will be recorded. If not, they're cast in the Lake of Fire rather than entering into the joy of the Lord forever. So how does God compute the cost and payment for sin? Very carefully. How has church history presented this? And that's where we got last week. I showed a kind of a family tree of all denominations, including the Roman Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and all the Christian denominations. How has the church presented the way of salvation? And, and how can we see this contrast between the two ways? Well, religion says normal people make it to heaven this way. And I'll just show you a drawing. This is, how do you like this drawing? This is one of our theologian elders, Sam Logan. He loves to draw things. Uh, basically, this, we're all born. Most people would agree we're born unrighteous. And religion says if you get baptized as a baby, that it immediately infuses to you a state of grace, and you're kind of on level ground headed toward God. But, you know, babies and toddlers and teenagers and adults sin. They're called venial sins in religion. And then if you're contrite and confess and, you know, cooperate with, you know, the sacraments, you're still bouncing along with the required righteousness to get you to heaven. So the goal is heaven. So we're born not headed to heaven, but religion says an experience or whatever, uh, most often a baptism will get you up to okay. And then you have to keep dealing with sins. Now, a mortal sin, boom, puts you right back. You're zero. You're, you know, bad, headed toward, you know, a long time getting rid of the sin. This is Purgatory down here. This is a purgation. But if you, you know, do penance and, and have purchased indulgences, do, you know, reparative acts, merit, and good works, you can keep working. And some people work really hard. But basically, there's a shortfall between what's required for heaven and where they end up. Even if they, you know, only venally sin, and that gap sends them, the shortfall sends them down here by default. They go to Purgatory at death. So when life ends, religion says most people won't make it good enough, so they've got to make the final payments down here, or have their family purchase indulgences, pay for religious, you know, kindness and deeds and prayers and candles to get them out of there and get them to heaven. So that's basically religion and the gospel of religion of merit. Is this: born a sinner, baptism washes and gives us a fresh start, venial sins can be dealt with by confession, penance, merits, and good works, mortal sins put you back to start, and you have longer purging at death. Only saints go to heaven. Boy, that's the first thing in this chart that's true. That's what the Bible says. At death, only saints go to heaven. The question is, who are saints? And that's really the question. The rest go to Purgatory. Uh, there, the time to purge is shortened by indulgences. That's what Martin Luther protested. Then they get to go to heaven. So that's the gospel of religion and merit, which is not, not doesn't sound very good. It sounds like a lot of purgatory. How religion says good people, as in saints, make it to heaven. Uh, you ever wondered about Mother Teresa, for example? She was born in unrighteousness. She was baptized. She came up here. She continued and confessed, but she began to have excess merit. And what religion does, says that this excess God puts into a treasury. She exceeded somewhere in life the required righteousness to get to heaven, and all her excess is donated down here for all those poor souls that aren't saints. That's what a saint is. And if the Roman Church canonizes them, the Roman Church examines their life, and they say they exceeded the required righteousness to get to heaven, their excess goes in the pool. At death, they go to heaven, and the pool is used for all the people back here that, uh, need to get out of Purgatory. Okay, so that's what religion says the good people happen. But what happens to everyone who's not canonized as a saint by religion? Well, at death, uh, they need purging and purging and purging, and family members are called upon to do masses so that they can finally get the required righteousness to finally get to heaven. And the worse they were, the more purging is needed. But what's God's simple plan of salvation? And, uh, this is where we'll pick up next time because we'll trace it through all the different denominations and sects and the Orthodox and Catholic Church. This is what it says in the Bible. 2 Corinthians 5:21 could be the single most important verse in the whole Bible. If you had to kind of take all 31,000 verses and only keep one, it says this: "For He," that's God, "has made Him," that's Jesus Christ, "to become sin for us." So Jesus didn't sin. He became sin. That means he took it on himself. That means here is me, and all my sins go on Jesus, so that the righteousness of God might be mine through Him. Jesus' perfect life is exchanged and put on me, and my sin is put on Him. So Jesus treated, was treated by God as if he had lied, cheated, stolen, been proud, been lustful, and wicked like me. And God treated him like he did all that, and God treats me like I have the righteousness of Christ. Which is the instant that exchange takes place, I became a saint and didn't even need to be canonized. And so did every one of you that let the simple plan of salvation be yours by faith. So when we come back next time, this is the drawing by, uh, our wonderful, um, elder that likes to draw things. At conversion, we go from righteousness, the way we were born, through faith and repentance, to perfect righteousness, which the Bible calls justification. I was declared righteous in Christ, but my life doesn't quite match up to God's declaration. And so God works with me all the way through life, and there's always a shortfall. We always fall short of the glory of God. But Jesus once and for all paid the price. Even though I never perfectly act Christlike because I trusted in Christ's work, and He imputed to me Christ's righteousness, God is going to make me become, and it's called glorification. Let me just erase this. Get back that word right there is the key. "I have been justified freely by His grace through the redemption in Christ." So God perfects me when I get to heaven. But I'm never free of sin here on Earth. That's how the Bible teaches salvation. And when we come back, uh, next time, we'll see that. But Matthew 7:13 says that life is like one of two roads, two trees, two relationships. There's the wide and the narrow. Which road are you on? I mean, that's what the kids were singing about tonight. Are you headed to the Father's house above? Do you know that Jesus is making a room? Do you have reservations? Or are your sins piling up that you're trying to pay for, and you never get them quite paid for? And someday God's going to say, "You didn't take my free gift. Cast him in the Lake of Fire." That is the difference between religion and revelation. Let's all stand. It's 7:02. We're almost snowed in. It's time to go. But what you just heard is the difference between religion and revelation, and it's really something that every one of us needs to examine. How do you think your sins are paid for? Either Jesus paid it all, or you're going to try forever to pay for them. Let's vow for word of this evening. We're going to, uh, continue until we have our new member induction a little after seven on looking at the, the snapshot of church history. One of the things that's so amazing is that, uh, many Christians kind of have this, because normal people don't like history, we often don't know a lot about our history. Uh, most people get bored by history, except for us that love history. And, and, uh, in fact, most of my, um, academic time was involved in history. I was a history major in college and then went on for a church history degree. But the focus of church history, and this is just basically what I'd like to give you tonight, is part of this will be the overview that is normal whenever you're, uh, in seminary for church history. I'll give you that. But I want to apply it, um, not as aptly as Phil Stickney did. I don't have any props. But when did the Roman Catholic Church begin? That's really what all of us need to grasp in our minds. And then what's the history? Where did Romanism come from? Uh, and, and just actually seeing how those fit. Now, remember, I made this drawing last time, and then I, I made a clearer one, and I wanted to start with this because someone was alarmed last time because I think I went CBC is or something like that, and they said, "Does that mean we're Armenian?" I said, "No, it doesn't mean we're Armenian." I, I would say that we're like this: Calvary is biblical, but we have people at Calvary from liturgical backgrounds like the Roman Catholic Church, with Reformation backgrounds, which would be Presbyterians and, and, um, Episcopalians, all those that are from the Reformation era. We have even Evangelical, which are the Baptists and, you know, all of the, the Billy Graham era. And then we have people, of course, that are from the, the charismatic, um, spectrum. And so actually, Calvary has within it as a body, I, I, in my eight or nine years of getting to know people, all of these dimensions, and all of the dimensions of the Roman Catholic Church that are true, that's biblical, and all the parts of the Reformation that are true, that's biblical, and all the parts of the, uh, uh, Evangelical Church that are true, as well as everything that's part of the charismatic movement that's true. And for every one of us, we cringe for the other three, uh, because most people, as, as, uh, the disaster team was saying, we don't really know well enough the other dimensions. And so it's, it's kind of to say that any part of the Charismatic Church would make some people cringe. Uh, for others, the, the Evangelical Church appears to be Republican, conservative, and almost like the, the president-elect. And other people, they think that the Reformation means no gospel sharing. And of course, the Roman Catholic Church would be totally works-oriented. But basically, Calvary Bible Church is a church that seeks to be in this square, is what God's word, the Bible, says. And within that, there are the Augustinian, reformed, Calvinistic types, and the Arminian, kind of, uh, uh, uh, not so, uh, reformed types. And all of them would seek to be biblical. Now, here's the quick overview of church history before we go into Romanism. Basically, the New Testament, the, the, uh, gospels flowing into the book of Acts and out to the Epistles. The New Testament world was a world framed by these three words. It was Jewish, in that we see it through the eyes of the New Testament. It was Greek, in that it had been Hellenized, or the conquest of Alexander the Great, who conquered the entire known world, in his lifetime. He began to be a general at 12, and he died at, at 33, and in 21 years, he conquered the world. But his most amazing achievement was taking Greek culture out of little tiny Greece and spreading it all across the world. And it, it spread through the world so that the Roman world, as in the Roman Empire, was, was Greek to the core, and had all of the, the city state, even the architecture that, uh, Greece had exported. And in the background of that is our Old Testament Jewish, um, kind of flavor that we see. And there was a worldwide, and nearly universal in the New Testament citizenship. Whenever it talks about that, it's Roman citizenship. Now, some people don't like the fact that, in fact, the liberalism of America doesn't like us being Western in our view, and there's almost a desire to rewrite history to make it Eastern in view. But actually, the scriptures are the one that give us our perspective. And God actually says that the bullseye of the world is neither on the west nor the East, but where the west and the East meet, and that is in Jerusalem. And so, if you know anything about, uh, the, the Eastern world, the Oriental world, and the Western World, the Occidental world, actually, the crossroads is Istanbul, but the Middle East really is the convergence point between the Eastern cultures, Oriental cultures, and the Occidental Western cultures. So actually, God puts the, the bullseye not on Eastern or Western cultures, but in the scriptures, it's Jerusalem that's the crossroads of the whole orientation of the Bible. And so, in the biblical times, you know, I'm not going to talk about how big the wall of, you know, the tribes of China were, because that isn't really the focus of the Bible. The Bible's focus is what was going on surrounding Israel, and that's, that's kind of permeated Western culture, um, that that fixation there, which leads us to Roman citizenship, which was nearly universal. Roman law, uh, was what just permeated, uh, everything. That's why Paul would be captured, tied up, questioned, and when he mentioned that he was a Roman citizen, they immediately were scared, backed off, and untied him because the rule of law applied throughout the empire. There was a common language, it was called Koine Greek, back to Alexander. Koine means common, that's what people spoke. And Latin is the, the language of the legal system. And so commerce was done in Koine Greek, and, uh, all the, the legal paraphernalia and political paraphernalia was done in Latin. There was during the Bible time, during the New Testament time, what was called the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, which was basically started in the time of Augustus and Caesar Octavian Augustus Caesar. And this, this time of peace made the Roman Empire, uh, just be the, the actual like greenhouse for the gospel because the, the laws and the language and the peace, coupled with this transportation system, the Roman roads, actually went from Britain to Northern Africa, all the way to where you could see India in the distance, and all the way up to the steppes of Russia, and down into the Arabian Peninsula. There were Roman roads. In fact, if you go to Israel, you can see little mile markers, and they marked how far it was to Rome. And, and Matthew would have sat next to one of those mile markers as he was a tax collector. When you crossed the, the mile marker in that jurisdiction between two, uh, provincial areas, the transportation system had little stops for you to go and pay your taxes. And there were local, and there were provincial, and there were, you know, all the way through to imperial taxes. But the transportation system made it so that you could actually know how long it would take you to get to anywhere in the Roman Empire. Uh, they had, they had walking, um, it was ready for pilgrims to walk, and you could walk down the Roman Road, and every 10 miles, there was a way station. Every 30 miles, there was a, a place to sleep overnight and put up your animals. And it was just, uh, almost like AAA, you know, you could just get a map and know how long it would take to get to Spain or wherever you went. But with the Jewish, Greek, Roman New Testament world, there was nearly universal moral decline. And Rome's prosperity and Rome's, uh, just raw power led to the, the kind of promulgation of the worst of morality, starting from the top down with the Caesars being so decadent. So the New Testament world was a world with one citizenship, one law, one language, one peace, one transportation, one moral decline. The Bible defines that very clearly in Galatians 4:4 and 5, and that's the first place I want to show you this evening. This is what it says in Galatians because it isn't by accident that the New Testament world is characterized in that way. It says in Galatians 4, verse 4, "But when the fullness of the time had come, God waited until there was a global language. God waited until there was the opportunity for people to cross any border and have this, this kind of, uh, um, open door as Paul could go anywhere in the empire as a citizen and spread the gospel with the protection of the Roman government and this peacefulness that you could travel all these roads, and not be waylaid." If you know anything about Caesar, Caesar was captured, Julius Caesar was captured by the pirates, and he vowed he would, you know, he was a rich, aristocratic, you know, brat, and his rich family bailed him out. But he looked at those pirates, he said, "I'm going to come back and get rid of you guys." And he did. And he, he's the one that was on the onset before, uh, just a predecessor to Octavian Augustus, who got the transportation system safe. And God waited till the fullness of the time had come, and in that time, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, to be born under the law, verse 5, "to redeem those that were under the law." And the reason that redemption was so needed is because of this darkness of the world and of their moral, absolute declension. In fact, the historians say that the Roman Empire was much like a pool.

So why did the early church get persecuted? And by the way, the persecution of Christians is which leads into what we know as the Roman Catholic Church, because of the whole growth of the church through persecution and the emperor's involvement in that. The reason that the, the, that history tells us Christians were persecuted, basically, there are five reasons. They were accused of being haters of humanity. Now, that's actually the legal, uh, charge that's in the records of the Roman Empire. They have records, a lot of the judicial proceedings of Rome are still around, recorded. They recorded everything. And one of the crimes of Christianity is they were haters of humanity, which could be translated as this: they didn't follow the customs of Rome. And if you know anything about Rome, they had a complete calendar, uh, all of the festivals to all the gods, the gladiatorial games were a part of culture, that that Christians, and the theater was part of culture. The Greek theater, inherited from Alexander, brought into the Roman Empire, was part of culture. And Christians stopped following the calendar of paganism when they got saved. And they no longer were in lockstep with all their neighbors who all celebrated the same things, who all were involved in the same events. That's why Peter said, uh, that when the Christians didn't do it, the former people were ashamed because they were running in riot, doing all their deeds of darkness. And these people kind of stood out. And as everyone pursued their, their personal vices, these other people weren't going that way. And whenever someone doesn't go the same way you are, you wonder whether you're going the wrong way, and you don't like them because they make you feel guilty. So they accused them of hating humanity, not following the customs of Rome. Uh, they did not follow the, the, uh, kind of the entertainment of Rome. The theaters of Greece were what we would call X-rated. I mean, nudity was normal in the theater, as were all types of different vices. And so Christians, when they, when they came to Christ, they stopped going to the theaters, the, the Greek theaters. They stopped going to the games because of bloodshed, because God was opposed to bloodshed. Uh, they were thought to be secondly cannibals. There was no glass in the window, so if you went outside a Christian's home and were spying on them, you would hear someone with a very, you know, reverent voice saying, "This is my body, eat it." And people outside, I mean, they were talking about Christ in communion, but people outside said they're eating, uh, humans. In fact, they would say that they even started saying that they were involved in, uh, eating children and, and sacrificing children. And, and so they were accused of being cannibals. Uh, this all led to causing shame among the pagans for several reasons. The Christians, of course, didn't get involved in the bathhouse scene, which every town in Rome had a central bathhouse that everyone used. And it's nothing wrong taking a bath, but it, you know, public nudity, public swimming, with public drinking, with public eating, and public everything else led to great immorality, great immorality. And so the Christians would, you know, go to the bath and leave and didn't stay to eat and play and everything else, and it made the pagans ashamed. And so they accused them, uh, for that. And they were zealously missionary. They went everywhere speaking the word of God. You persecute in one place, they'd go to the next place. And they were devoutly exclusive. The early church did not regularly allow lost people in. That's why they were outside the windows thinking they're cannibals. We've come a long way. The early church believed that they were the gathering of the redeemed, the body of Christ, and they wouldn't let someone that proposed or claimed to be saved even come to communion often for months till they proved themselves that they were really a Christian and that, you know, some wolf in sheep's clothing. And so they were, the church was the gathering of the worship of God's people, the gathering of the body. And if you're unsaved, you're not part of the body, and, and you don't come. And so the, the exclusivity of the church, the evangelistic zeal, the moral, uh, high level that they lived at, the, the celebration of communion and breaking from culture, boy, we've come a long way. If Barna and Gallup would have been around in the first century, they would have statistically said, "Wow, Christians are so distinctly different than pagans." But now, by the 21st century, we follow the same entertainment. Many people, communion is great if they make it, but they don't even really pay attention to it. The moral, uh, condition of Christians is very similar to lost people. Both their premarital involvement, their extramarital involvement, and their, uh, consumption of prurient materials. Most believers nowadays, to be generalizing, are not zealous witnesses. I mean, we might be here, but we're abnormal. Most people are not. And churches are no longer devoutly exclusive. In fact, we've gone the other way. We want to make no one feel uncomfortable in church, and so change everything, make them feel absolutely at home, which is not a New Testament or biblical at all, uh, idea. Jesus, uh, made them feel uncomfortable, but he loved them personally, but, but he was always offending them, uh, because of his call. So that's why they were persecuted.

How were they persecuted? Basically, there were four eras of persecution that led right up to, uh, the what we would call the beginning of the Roman Catholic Church. Nero, that bad guy we all know about. Nero, he lived 54 to 68, basically the time period of Paul's Epistles, uh, he's, he's from the, the Corinthian Epistles, the Roman Epistles, the epistle to Rome, and all the way through Paul's final Epistles. And, uh, pre-54 would be the Thessalonian Epistles and the Galatian Epistles. But, uh, Nero sporadically persecuted people, and he only persecuted them in Rome. And of course, we all know, so he could build the city, and, you know, he burned the city, blamed it on them, and persecuted them a little bit. And his, his, uh, persecutions were spectacular. In fact, I've said before that the, the Roman, uh, Coliseum, that big Roman Coliseum building, uh, is, uh, built over the lake where Nero would light his banquets with torches of humans dipped in tar, alive, burnt as torches. It, it was, he was a very cruel person and very spectacular in his persecutions, but it was only during his time. And kind of like they forgot about the Christians for a while until Trajan. And Trajan is, uh, another Roman Emperor from 98 to, um, 117. And if you've ever heard of, uh, like Navona, the Piazza Navona, and, and places like that, the, the some of the, like Trajan's, he has a lot of different obelisks and stuff, but he was a great warrior, but he began to note the growth of Christianity from the time.

Of uh, uh, after just after the imprisonment of John on Patmos, all the way through the next, uh, 20 years, and he started doing provincial work on rooting out the Christians. And that's where we get some of the early writings about Christianity, um, like, uh, uh, the, the famous one that says Christians, you know, care for one another, and if they see someone that's poor, they fast a meal and give the money away. All of those writings are from the time of Trajan.

And then things kind of settled down. It was kind of sporadic persecution until Decius and the Decian persecution. He, Decius the emperor in 250 was the first one that had empire-wide persecution. So they declared Christianity to be, although it was known to be illegal, it was illegal, you know, from border to border of the Roman Empire. And the Diocletian persecution is the first time the church, uh, really was back to the Nicaean times where they were hunted down everywhere, hiding in the catacombs, uh, chased everywhere. And, and all, but they kind of died down for a little while until the final, uh, most powerful emperor, Diocletian, uh, as far as most powerful persecutor. And he persecuted the church for approximately 10 years, and he was the most complete persecutor. It was his personality. Diocletian was a civil engineer. He's the only emperor that retired. I mean, can you believe it? He did his thing. He redid everything in Rome, got the sewers and the roads and the tax system and everything all worked out. And, and while he was doing that, on the side, he built his own city on the Adriatic shore, over in what we would say is, uh, what Croatia or somewhere over there on the shore, uh, Dubrovnik. I don't know what the name of his, the current name, but he had a house in a city over there and he built it on the side. And finally, he got it all done and he says, "I'm done being emperor," and he moved over there. No one else ever did that. Everyone else died either of dissipation or wounds, you know, as a Roman emperor, but he retired.

But he, his mind was so good that he said, "The way we're going to attack Christianity, number one, get rid of the leaders." So every known pastor of any church was hunted down, imprisoned, or killed. Then he said, "Wherever they're meeting, we'll destroy it. If they're meeting in a house and you let them, there goes your house." And usually the church met in the homes of the wealthy, and, and that's how you'd have 100 people there. And so all these wealthy people, their houses were being destroyed. And then his legionnaires went through, and there is not a single complete Bible that is from before his time, because he destroyed every complete copy of God's word. And that's why we have 25,000 manuscripts. There are only four or five complete ones. None of them predate him because he got every one of them.

But what we have is the early church divided up the Bible, kind of like, uh, in Eastern Europe when we used to deliver Bibles in the '70s. If you would give someone in Russia or in the Soviet, uh, Iron Curtain countries, a Bible, they would immediately take it apart. No one kept the Bible together. They'd take all the books apart and pass them out. And so they'd have 66, you know, or 40 or whatever divisions they had made, always circulating in the church. So if anybody was arrested, only that book got lost, not the whole thing. And so that's what the early church did. But he got rid of every known pastor, got rid of every known church building, got rid of every known Bible. And that was the crescendo of all the, um, persecutions that, uh, that are known from this time.

So this is an overview. This is what everybody has to memorize when they, uh, take church history. It's an overview of church history. Uh, basically, there are three eras of church history. Uh, there's the early church. You've always heard of the early church. Uh, that's when, uh, things were, uh, basically kind of how you read them in the New Testament. Uh, the apostles lived through the death of John, somewhere in the late '90s. The Martyr period, uh, goes from about Nero's time all the way through, uh, the, the end of Diocletian's huge, uh, 10-year persecution. And then we start this period of Christian rulers. Constantine, if you've heard of him, he's the one from 313. He is the one that conquered, um, Rome. I mean, there's so many things we could talk about, but he converted to Christianity. He had a vision, heard a voice, saw a sign, and it was the sign of a cross. He painted a cross on all the shields of the legionnaires. He was fighting another general for, for, you know, who is going to be the, the next emperor, uh, and he won because he painted the crosses on. So he said, "We'll make the Roman Empire Christian." And so there was a succession of Christian-friendly Roman emperors.

We all know about, um, Constantine's mother, Helena, who, who built a church everywhere. I mean, she loved to build stuff. I don't know if she was a Christian, but she loved to build. And all over the Holy Land, there are these basilicas that she built of immense size. Just the foundations of some of them are monstrous buildings. And she used all the wealth of the Roman Empire with this Christian emperor son of hers. And that just began, uh, a series of amazing building projects. And this time, if you've ever heard of it, is called the, the Byzantine era, the time when Rome, uh, was Christian. And the Byzantine era, then you've all heard of the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Times in church history. The Middle Ages or the Medieval Times or the Dark Ages are when, after this Byzantine time, basically the Roman Catholic Church starts coming to power in AD 590. And I'll show you a chart of that in just a moment. The first real Pope is in AD 590, and he was the first one called a Pope. They weren't really called that. They, they kind of, after this period, they kind of built backward, you know, and kind of did backfill to fill in, get a succession. But he was the first real Pope, and, uh, his name was Gregory the, the, Pope Gregory. And he became the, the kind of prototype of what we call the Popes.

And the Medieval Times go from the first real Pope to the Reformation in 1517. Within that, just like within the early church, there were three eras. Missionary era is not missionaries you think. It's missionary Roman Catholic monks going out. And the, the monks went out, and the different orders went out, and the, the spread of the missionary, you know, the Jesuits and the, the, uh, you know, Ignatius of Loyola sending out. And they were kind of like the, the cutting edge of the church. And then behind them, the Franciscans and, uh, the others. But basically, this is the era, for example, Poland was, was baptized in, um, about 900, uh, 990 or I don't remember the exact date, but about 400 years into this, they had moved north and got to Poland. And in one year's period of time, the priests went out and baptized. And by baptized, it's like a, a whisk broom and holy water, and you go like that, and you can hit a hundred people at a time with kind of a spray of water. And they went through the country and they did that across until the entire country of Poland was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. That's the missionary era. Columba, went, St. Patrick, St. Patrick's Day, all of those different times. This is the time they were spreading out.

The end of this period, uh, these are not arbitrary dates. All of these are mile markers in history. This, this is known as, uh, Canossa. This is the, the time when the papal era starts. And the event that took place at Canossa, it was the first time that the European emperors had to come to the Pope to get emperor. All the different kings of, you know, of France and of Italy and of England or whatever, they had to come. And the Pope in Germany, you know, the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, the Pope is the one that installed them. By 1049, the Roman Church had grown to such power that, uh, the zenith was actually in 1294. A guy named Innocent III, he was a Pope. He's called the Warrior Pope, but Innocent III, and, and Julian and others were unbelievably powerful. They basically controlled Europe because if you didn't obey, they would break off mass for your town or your country, and the people would be excommunicated, which means kept from communion. If you don't have communion, you're not going to heaven, you're going to go indefinitely or forever to purgatory or worse, to hell. And so Innocent III controlled Europe, and that was the, the zenith, uh, of the, uh, by 1303, uh, with Boniface and all the others. It's amazing the level they got to, which led to this pre-Reformation era. The more powerful the church got, the more decadent it got.

Now, you remember Chaucer, as in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, he's writing in this pre-Reformation era, and about the, the pilgrimages to Canterbury, which was the, the Catholics were in England, you know, they, they had, through the missionary era, taken over and Christianized the pagans of England. And in this time period, the, the clergy were so wealthy, so powerful, and so decadent that this, this is really a low point for the church right here. And that's what's, what really sparked, uh, the pre-reformers. And there were many of them, but three you've all heard of: Wycliffe in England, Roman Catholic scholar and priest, who wanted the people to read the Bible, and so he translated into English and really was hounded. In fact, they never martyred Wycliffe, but they ended up exhuming his body and burning him because after he died of a stroke, he was so bad, they wanted to burn him anyway, even though he'd already died. And so they dug him up and burned him and, and, you know, said he wasn't going to heaven, where actually he brought the scriptures into the English language. Wycliffe, that's why the mission is called Wycliffe, you know, because he brought it into the people's language.

Another fellow that followed Wycliffe is a guy named Hus, um, and another one named Savonarola. Now, Savonarola, uh, was a preacher. Both of them were preachers, but Savonarola stood against the excesses of the Catholic priests and the Medici family and all the Pope Alexander VI, who had 60 children, and he wasn't supposed to be married, but he still had 60 children, you know, which was a problem. And, uh, he, Savonarola said, "You shouldn't do that." And so they burned him alive in Florence on a stake in the center of the town because he preached the scriptures should be followed, not a powerful rich man that's breaking the rules. Hus was the same. Only he was, Savonarola was from Italy. Hus was from Czechoslovakia, from Prague, uh, scholar, both of them, priest, both of them, uh, all three of them, actually, with Wycliffe, and all of them are typical of what was going on. The Roman Catholic Church might be getting bad, but there were always believers that were not in agreement with it.

Until one young, uh, Augustinian, uh, monk by the name of Martin Luther in 1517, took all of the grievances that Wycliffe had had, um, that Savonarola and Hus had pointed out, plus the ones he had found in his own studies, and he posted those for debate in Latin and put them on the church door as his desire to talk about why these things were going on in the church, which launched what we would call modern times.

Now, within this time period, actually right in here, the papal era also was when we had that ignominious time called the Crusades. And the Crusades are not Christian. That's why Campus Crusade, you know, dropped the Crusade part because they don't want people to think of, you know, and Billy Graham used to do Crusades, but Crusade is fine. Those are not fine. The, the European Crusades to the Middle East killed and slaughtered Jews, killed and slaughtered the Muslims, and killed and slaughtered Europeans on the way, and raped them and everything else in between. It was just like mobs of of adventure seekers from Europe who went to the Middle East purportedly to rescue the holy sites from the infidels. But in God's amazing plan, though, everything they did was, was not very good. What happened is the Crusades lasted for about 200 years. I mean, it took an awful long time to build up, and then they'd send a batch, and then they'd all get murdered and killed, and they'd come back, and then they'd build up again. And so it was about a 200-year period of time the Crusades went on.

But the whole time they were going from the Middle East back to Europe, and Europe had no spices. Everything was preserved with salt and basically was half rotten. Uh, they had, it was the Dark Ages. I mean, there was very little scholarship. The church kept people. Most people lived within sight of a Roman Catholic church, and they were born and lived and died in sight of that steeple and were buried in the backyard of the church, and they never went anywhere until the Crusades. And once they went on those boats across, uh, the Mediterranean, they were never the same. They brought back spices, they brought back manuscripts, they brought back the exquisite Islamic art and everything else that was over there. And it, it started what is right in this time period, the Renaissance. This whole renewal. I mean, everybody wanted to know what those manuscripts said and where those spices came from and all that kind of stuff. And, and it began to be people going to Europe, and they wanted from Europe to the Middle East. And that's where the manuscripts started showing up, and, and the modern times and the scholasticism or the, the scholarship of the reformers started showing.

So from the Reformation era till 1648, that's the next period of time, which is the Peace of Westphalia is in 1648. That's the number. And that was when Europe stopped fighting. Remember, there's the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, and all that stuff that was so boring in history. There were religious wars, and it was basically between the Catholics and the Protestants, and, and countries became, you know, uh, all something or tried to be all something, you know, Protestant or, uh, or Catholic, or, um, uh, Roman Catholic. And then the denominations started really growing in that time period.

From the Peace of Westphalia through 1790. 1790 is the launch of modern missions. That's, that's William Carey. That's why in church history, the first Pope marks the end of the ancient times. The Reformation marks the end of the medieval times. And, uh, this 1517 launches the modern times with denominations and global missions being the, the demarcation. And when Carey went out from England to translate the Bible and to take the gospel to the darkest parts of of India and, and that whole subcontinent, it, it changed everything because people started following him, you know, Judson, and then just the whole missions movement. And then from that time on, it's not only a time of missions, but also liberalism, of the denial of the truth of the scriptures and the supernatural, uh, nature of the gospel. Come on, there we go.

So basically, we could mark this as the crucifixion of Christ here through the, the legalization of Christianity, uh, is one great era. Then this whole period would be the Dark Ages with the Roman Catholic Church growing. Wycliffe, a pre-reformer. Hus, a pre-reformer. Because of the excesses, we have the Greek Orthodox Church breaking off and the Roman Catholic Church, and that division in 54, uh, the Great Schism or Schism, uh, and basically the, the, uh, Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, are this entire time through the Renaissance, which I already said. And so all of this, um, all of this is what led to, and let me get to the chart, just so you can see this. Those are all the church councils. You don't need to see that. Um, the, the, oh, here are the pre-reformers: Wycliffe, Hus, and Savonarola. The Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, and the Lutheran, uh, 30 years later, um, you know, John Calvin started his, uh, Geneva work, the breakoff of Henry VIII into the Anglican Church, and then down, I told you about all the denominations. As I said, the denominationalism starts there.

And I showed you this. It's the same idea, only it's a cover of US News and World Report. But see, basically, this is what, and, and what we'll, we'll look more deeply historically next time. It is in the time of the first Pope that Purgatory, Gregory I, is the one that introduced the idea of purgatory because what do you do with people that don't act like Christians and they claim to be Christians? You say, "Well, then you're going to have to go to the waiting room and purge for a while, you know, burn away that sin." And so he invented, and, and actually it was not an invention, it had been around for a long time, this idea that you could kind of take care of your own sins through good works and through sacrifices, but the church had never adopted it till 593. And so the first Pope declared, "There is a purgatory." And it's not in the Bible. You can't find it in the Bible. It's not in the Bible.

So what they did is they bound into their Bibles the Apocrypha. Why? Because the Apocrypha talks about making sacrifices for the dead, prayers for the dead. Comes from the Apocrypha. You say, "What's the Apocrypha?" The Apocrypha are collected Jewish writings from the time period from after Daniel and through, actually, through the time of Christ. So the Apocrypha was extant, that means it was in circulation during the lifetime of Jesus Christ. And Jesus rejected the Apocrypha and said, "That is not scripture." He said, "This is scripture." And he took as Ezra's Old Testament model of the law and the prophets and the writings, and he said, "That is the Holy Scripture, not the Apocrypha." But Pope Gregory said, "Right here, he said, we need to have purgatory." And so they added to the Bible the Apocrypha, and it's still with us to this day. Roman Catholics have the Apocrypha, you know, Tobit and Judith and Maccabees, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, and Bel and the Dragon, and all that stuff, all those books of the Apocrypha. What is the Apocrypha? It's kind of like good literature. I mean, it's got some errors in it, but it's kind of like reading history because it's a lot about the Jewish wars and everything else, but it's not inspired scripture.

But the Catholic Church wanted to get purgatory, then they start assuming temporal powers, um, and start having papal documents, uh, to grant power to Rome. And then, uh, the greatest divorce. Clergy were forced by Gregory VII. Remember I said the crescendo is going up? That Roman Catholic priests were married, and that's part of the Orthodox schism. That the Roman Church had to have celibate clergy. That's where we get all the problems nowadays because God says it's better to marry than to burn. And doesn't Paul say, "You only are unmarried if you are, uh, you know, it's for the glory of God and if it's for you to focus totally on the Lord"? Well, they weren't, they were supposed to do it for the church. And they had the largest divorce in history forced upon all the clergy of the Roman Church by Gregory VII. And then we go from there into money for masses that you could get people out of purgatory.

Then what do you do with people that don't agree? The Inquisition starts in the 12th century. Inquisition hunting down people that had the Bible in their own language, hunting down people that preached salvation apart from the sacraments. Then they start selling in 1190 indulgences. And indulgences is to get your aunt out of purgatory, or your uncle, or your grandpa, or your children. And if you buy this, so many years are taken out of purgatory. And they even made it if you walk through certain, and to this day, if you walk through certain doors at the Vatican at St. Peter's, you get time out of purgatory. And they have jubilees and everything. And then by 1215, the Mass began in the form we know it today, transubstantiation, which we'll look at doctrinally. And then they went beyond that to the adoration of the host, which said that not only, um, did the bread become the body of Christ, but you can worship the bread as Christ. And, uh, then the Bible was actually put on the Index for, uh, death if you read it. And then the final ultimate was Unam Sanctam in 1303, which said, um, outside the church, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church, there's no salvation. And that was, uh, the full-blown Roman Catholic Church.

When we come back next time, uh, let me show you, we're going to look at how this fits biblically. This is part of Satan's plan. Satan has always been in rebellion, and, uh, uh, he basically has wanted to have a counterfeit church. So through the Tower of Babel, he organized religion. And from religion, the, there's no idolatry on earth till Babylon. We, that's when Satan introduced it to the world. And from that Babylonian religions, we get the, the wife of Nimrod, uh, becomes the founder of basically what we see in every world religion. And, uh, both the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans all followed the Tower of Babel stuff. And all that is right from Christ's warnings and Revelation. We'll pick up there next time.

But you've been sitting so long, you're going to fall asleep and be snowed in. So let's all stand up. And, uh, we don't want anybody to fall asleep. And because, uh, you need to shovel, but, uh, this evening, uh, we need to get to our jet tour of church history. And basically, what we're going to do is, is, is just finish up what we were doing, uh, two weeks ago or three weeks before all those no Sunday night Christmas and New Year. And basically, it's this: we left off with the Jewish, Greek, Roman world, the Jewish, uh, moral philosophy, the Greek culture, and the Roman rule. And we looked at all that, and, and what the world looked like then. Christians were being persecuted. And especially, I took you through the eras, uh, Nero, that we've all heard of, Trajan, who expanded it across entire provinces, Decius, who took it by the empire, and then I told you about Diocletian, who destroyed every building, killed every pastor, destroyed every, uh, known copy, complete copy of the Bible. So the Christians divided them up.

Well, that takes us to what happened. And that's what really most Christians just need a kind of like a connection. And basically, the, the connection is between this, how do you go from James, you know, the early church in Jerusalem that we read about, and Paul, and, and all of the, come on back here, uh, James and Paul, how do you get to from that to the Roman Catholic Church? You read the New Testament epistles, you see the early church in Jerusalem, you see the church planning work of Paul. How do you get to what we have with Constantine legalizing Christianity and merging it? And basically, that's why that bio, that tagline was, "If you can't beat them, join them." Because during these persecutions, what happened is from the, the early persecutions, the more they ramped them up and intensified them, the more people came to Christ. In fact, Tertullian, who is a, a, a legal expert and, and came to Christ, he coined the famous phrase, uh, he was a Roman, that "the blood of the saints is the seed of the church." In other words, he said, "The more the blood was shed, the more the church grew." From the ashes of the arena, from the, uh, horrific, uh, if you've been in the news, the horrible prison riots and murders and deaths that was going on in Brazil, that is just a tiny picture of the horrors of the, of the horrible martyrdom, cruel animal-eaten Christian innocently in the arena for sport. But the more their blood was shed of true saints, it, it just burst forth. By the fourth century, people were coming to Christ faster than they could kill them.

And what happened in Constantine? He was the emperor in 313 AD, and he was a very practical man, and he was seeing he was losing his legionnaires because the legionnaires that bound the Christians and threw them into the arena, the Christians that, that were bound and, and thrown off cliffs, which is what Trajan started, they would just tie them up, lead the town out, and say, "Renounce Christ, we'll cut you loose. Don't renounce Christ, we're pushing you over the cliff." Now, imagine coming to Kalamazoo legionnaires tying up everybody on your block, bring them to a cliff, say, "Renounce Christ or we're going to push you over." That's what they did systematically through the provinces. And those Roman hardened soldiers heard the words of those saints who, who, yes, it's fearful to die, but they had hope beyond death. And those Roman legionnaires gradually, through the collective testimony of so many martyrs, embraced Christ to the point that Constantine says, "I'm not going to have an army left if I don't do something." And so that's basically, uh, what precipitated this.

Well, uh, again, where we fit into the, the, um, Apostolic Age is the time from, uh, the crucifixion of Christ right here through John on Patmos. The martyrdom starts under, uh, the, the reign of Nero, and it goes all the way through the beginning of Constantine's reign, which is the 313 I've mentioned. And that precipitates this time known as Christian rulers. And it's right here that we would mark the beginning of the Roman Catholic Church, right here in this time, at the end of martyrdom and the beginning of these Christian rulers. And that issues into what we know as the Dark Ages or the Medieval Times, and then the modern Europe.

So what happened? Well, this is a, a brief history of the true church. What does the Bible say? What does history record? Now, if, if you're into reading, uh, oh man, what is his name? The Wheaton professor, uh, I'll think of it in a second. He's one of my favorite church, uh, Earl Cairns. There we go. Uh, Earl, my favorite church historian, Earl Cairns. Now, this is for popular reading. I mean, there are K. Scott, Latourette, and Philip Schaff. There are many eight-volume exhausting treatments. This man taught for generations at Wheaton. Earl Cairns, and he wrote A History of the Christian Church. That's the title of his book. And for anybody that, I mean, if you like to kind of really feel you have a good grasp of what happened, the history of the church, that was the, the textbook that, that was used when I used to teach it at the Master's College. And, uh, and alluded to it, although they used the exhausting books at the seminary.

So from Earl Cairns, I'd like to give you what I would call a jet tour of church history. And basically, it would be this: the New Testament was completed, uh, during the lifetime of John in AD 96, and from that period, basically, uh, sometime right about here in the '60s all the way through AD 313, it's red because this is the martyrdom time, and that's what we're going to focus on tonight. The time from Nero's first intense murder of believers all the way through the, the Diocletian massive massacre of Christians, and then the Christians, uh, becoming legalized. It's kind of like legalization of marijuana, you know, it, that's how radical it was for the legalization of Christianity because right up until the edict, uh, that he gave right after his victory, it was a capital punishment crime to be a Christian. And all of a sudden, the executioner says, "You're all safe. It's the state religion." That's how radical church history is.

So what happened is, uh, this is just a, um, uh, an ancient, uh, uh, Vatican painting of the event called the Milvian Bridge. This is something you can look up in history. Uh, it's the turning point for Constantine. And basically, it was the 28th of October in, uh, 312 AD. He's going up to the Milvian Bridge. And again, another tapestry from the Vatican shows that Constantine had a vision, a dream, and, and he was concerned because he was facing a rival to the throne of the empire. He was a general, there was another general with his legions, and they were coming, and they were going to face off at this place called the Milvian Bridge. And so he was going to come, and it was going to be decided in that battle who would be the Roman Emperor. So he's in his tent, his Roman tent, here, and, and what he later said is he had a dream, and it was this idea, and he dreamed in Latin, no less, in, I mean, he should have, he was Roman, that's a legal language, in hoc signo vinces, and "hoc" means this, "signo" means sign, "vinces" means victory. So, "In this sign, victory." And so he took the sign to be the cross, and he has a cross hastily painted on every shield of his army. And the short of it is, on that date at the Milvian Bridge, those with the red crosses on their shields, the, the sign that he saw, soundly defeated the rival general, and he assumed the emperorship. And so he, he made that known. And, and actually, the Roman Catholic Church, you know, accepted him. And he, of course, waited for his baptism till his deathbed, which is really a suspicious thing. He kind of wanted to play both sides and be a pagan, but he became a Christian in their terminology at the end.

Now, basically, what this kicks into is, and what I'm going to focus on tonight is the prophetic side. Because if you know anything about the Bible, uh, prophetically, you know that Revelation 17, the 17th chapter, talks about the global church that's in existence during the tribulation, a one-world church, and, and that the Antichrist is worshiped, and an image of him is. And we all know that from chapter 17. I mean, it starts way back in chapter 13, but the description of the harlot, that's what the church is called, a harlot that is drunken with the blood of the saints, and drinking out of a golden chalice, that has precipitated a lot of discussion. Who is the harlot? And what's this global church? One way of looking at the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 is this: that not only was Ephesus a local church in Asia Minor, Turkey, not only was it a local church pastored by Timothy, founded by Paul, attended by John and Mary, the mother of our Lord, I mean, it was a great church with such a galaxy of famous people. It was not only a local church that Paul wrote letters to, not only a church that the Apostle John lived there and, and his epistles and his book of Revelation was sent there and printed and copied and sent out to the other churches. I mean, it was a great church, but it was not only a local church, it also apparently was speaking of an early era of the church, the, the church that, that was right in the time of Christ onward. And they were, they were loving fearlessly Christ, but they began to cool at the time of the persecutions.

The next church, the second church in Revelation 2 and 3, is Smyrna. And there is a period of time, basically from Nero's time through Diocletian, where the epistle or the letter Christ wrote to Smyrna is about being faithful unto death. And if you're faithful unto death, I'll give you a crown of life. And all of that, you know, that you're going to be persecuted. Then comes this church, and if you know anything about Pergamus and the Pergamite period, it exactly parallels this time period of the legalization of Christianity and the paganization. This time period is when the church picks up and flowing in through the Middle Ages, the Thyatiran period. Not only was this a local church, Smyrna, Pergamus, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, they were real churches, but they also fascinatingly portray the history of the church. If you remember Philadelphia, there's no condemnation to Philadelphia from Christ. There's also no condemnation to Smyrna when you're suffering. So, so key to having no condemnation from Christ is to be so bold that you're willing to suffer, and to be so bold you're willing to evangelize. Because evangelism is what Philadelphia was doing, and that parallels what we would call modern missions from 1790 with William Carey all the way through the post-World War II rush to the ends of the earth when, when so many people, in fact, a lot of the, those are some of the people that are, you know, down in Sebring, Florida, and those missionary retirement centers, who went out and spent their life in Japan and anywhere else they could go, and went to the, you know, like, like, uh, uh, into the jungles with, uh, Jim Elliot and Nate Saint and all those. It was that time period when global missions was just mushrooming.

But then the post-World War II prosperity has led us to a very parallel, uh, condition to Laodicea. Rich, increased with goods in the western world, and having need of nothing. So there's a prophetic map. And what tonight, this time period is what we're looking at. What caused this early church with all the zeal and the apostolic teaching that was willing to suffer for Christ? How did they get to the Middle Age church, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, the, the church that Martin Luther in 1517 pounds the theses for debate on the church wall? Well, basically, I would parallel that with a look at the seven reasons. And this is my own personal testimony. It's written out in the Living Hope book. The seven reasons why I'm not a Roman Catholic. And the seven reasons why I'm not a Roman Catholic is that the Mass is absolutely unbiblical. That Mary is attributed the attributes of God rather than the humanness that she has, and that she needed a savior. That the Roman Catholic Church trumps the Bible with their traditions. In fact, that's, remember the big square I gave, which I'll show you again, that's that's the danger. So much Roman Catholic doctrine is biblical, but the deadly part are the traditions, and, and of course, the paganism that's entered in, the veneration of images, the unbiblical attribution to sacraments of what only God can do, which is the, the bestowing of righteousness. The Roman Church teaches that that the church infuses, which is like an IV bag dripping into us righteousness to individuals through the sacraments. Purgatory, unbiblical, never mentioned in the Bible, antithetical to all doctrines of justification. Of course, the paganism, which we'll see tonight.

Now, you've already seen this chart many times. Christ died on the cross, God's word was written, the church was suffering, and it, it was, uh, kind of a mixed bag. Constantine legalized Christianity, so a lot of people want to go along with the bandwagon and they joined the church, and the church began to be diluted and diluted, not deluded, diluted, but the, the gross error didn't really start until about the sixth century. The first real Pope. There is a whole string. If you go to the Vatican, you can see all their names. Most of those men, if you'd have talked to them in their day, didn't know they were the Pope. They were bishops of the church in Rome. Rome always had a bishop, a pastor. And, uh, in fact, one of the pastors went out and met the, the barbarians when they came, and that's why they spared Rome. They, they sacked and took over the Roman Empire, but they didn't destroy the church there because he came out in his white robes and talked to them and everything. But the first real Pope was, he's called Gregory the First. And the first thing he did is he accommodated people that really had trouble either with their relatives who were pagans and didn't come to Christ, or their own lives that were so, uh, non-Christian. And so he invented a place of purging, purgation, purgatory. So purgatory is never in the Bible or the history of the church until the sixth century. That is the beginning of this terrible, uh, move. And you can see it in the big chart all the way down to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the infallibility of the Pope, and, uh, the Immaculate Conception of Mary dogma, which all are 19th century and onward things. I mean, it just keeps getting worse. Uh, and if I would have kept this going, we get to this syncretism, uh, where the current Pope is, uh, working on, and especially the prior one, Ratzinger, that became, I don't know all their names, but Ratzinger, the prior Pope, was the head of all the doctrine in Tübingen. And he is the most articulate. This new guy from Brazil is, is kind of charismatic, but the former one was a doctrinaire, and he began wooing back the Lutherans, the Orthodox, the Episcopalians, the broken-off branches, and they're in talks for reunification. So that, that's what happened.

Let me show you why it happened. And basically, let's go into the Bible. Let's start in Isaiah 14. I just want to put some, uh, kind of little posts around to survey what we're talking about. The first one is in Isaiah 14, and what it says in Isaiah 14 is the real conflict is not the Antichrist, and it's not the tribulation, and it's not the Pope, and it's not, you know, Constantine on the Milvian Bridge. It all starts much before that. In Isaiah 14:12, and this is the real problem. And see, that's why tonight, I got an email, I got an email Friday about a meeting tonight that's going on right now, and it's over at, uh, Hackett, or whatever the Roman Catholic school is called. And it was written to all of the, of the Christian churches of Kalamazoo, and Calvary was one of them. And it said, "Please come to sit with our Roman Catholic bishops." And I don't know who all they brought to Hackett to to meet with the Christian churches to embrace our unity in the gospel. It's tonight at 6 o'clock. That is staggering to think. Do you know what they're doing? They're planning to have at Wings Stadium a huge service to get every Roman Catholic and every Evangelical Christian can get packed into Wings Stadium and have a joint communion and say, "We're all Christians. We all serve the same Lord Jesus Christ, and we're going to have one united voice in Kalamazoo." How can you have a united voice if you don't even agree who a Christian is and what salvation is about? But that's what's going on right now. They're 51 minutes into their meeting. It started at 6. It's not about the Catholic Church. It's about this. Satan wants one thing. He wants to deceive people into thinking there's a broad road that leads to heaven, and, and all the churches are on it. That's why the Roman Catholic Church regularly has interfaith meetings in a UCC with Hindus, with Buddhists, with the Dalai Lama, with the Muslims, and with all the Protestants. They even bring in Oklahoma witch doctors, you know, medicine men from the, the tribal areas. They want one kind of voice of religion. It's not the Roman Catholic Church. They wouldn't be thinking of that. It's Satan. And what he said is, look at verse 12, "How you are fallen from heaven." This is where Satan came from. "O Lucifer, son of the morning." "How you are cut down." Verse 13, "For you have said in your heart." This is God telling Isaiah to write down where Satan came from. Satan was the highest created angel of all. He was the head of all God's creation until he said this in his heart, "I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God." Stars, remember it says in Job, all the, the stars, it's talking about the angels, the messengers of God. He's going to be above all the angels, the stars of God. "I will sit on the Mount of the congregation on the farthest side of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds." But look at the end of verse 14. This is a proof of inspiration. If man would have thought of this, if humans would have written the Bible, we would have said Satan would say at the end of 14, "I will be greater than the Most High." But Satan knows no one can be greater than the Most High because God is greater than the sum of everything He's made, and Satan knew he was made, he was a creature, he's not self-existent God. But all he wanted to do is to be like God. And when he thought that, the Lord says, verse 15, "You shall be brought down to Sheol, to the grave, to the lowest parts of the pit." And on and on it goes.

Um, the same event is recorded parallel in Ezekiel 28, only it tells there, this is the inside thinking, the pride. This is the mechanics that he was the anointed cherub of, and reflecting back God's glory. That is parallel to Revelation 17. Now turn to the other end of your Bible, Revelation 17, because real quickly, you see the twin plan that Satan has always had from the beginning. Satan hooks people in the world one of two ways. He gets them away from God. In Revelation 17, by religion. And all religions, God does not found or invent religion. God gives revelation. Religions are ways that people have invented under Satan's supervision. Remember what Paul said, "All the idols of the nations are demons." Every Buddha is a demon. The Kabbalah in Mecca is demon. That's why the more devout a Muslim gets, the more dangerous they get. Why? Because they're listening to the founder of Islam, who's the founder of every religion in the world. There's only one founder of religions, and he's the one who finally has a global religion in chapter 17. And here it is, um, it, it's in verse 5, "And on her forehead a name was written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth." And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, that's the Old Testament, and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, that's the New Testament. So what we see in 17 is how religion has always been opposed to Christianity and true followers of, of the true and living God. Religion, religion starts with Cain, right back in the, the Garden of Eden's gates, as Cain didn't want to offer a blood sacrifice that God required. He wanted to offer his best produce. In other words, "I'm going to give what I want. It's self-willed, it's self-designed religion." Abel was willing by faith to just do what God said. And what did Cain do to Abel? You all know Sunday school stories, right? Killed him. That's the beginning of religion. Religion has always, always been opposed to the truth, always. And so in 17, here is the global religion.

But what's 18? What's the other? If Satan can't get you hooked in religion of any kind, whether it's, you know, uh, witchcraft, or if it's tribal religion, or if it's atheistic religion, or if it's, you know, scientific religion, or just anything in between, what can he get you with? Chapter 18. And chapter 18 is verse 3, "All nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and they have committed fornication with her." And the verse 3, "The merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance." This is basically chapter 18 is the end of materialism, the end of living for money, um, the end of, of this, this whole materialistic world. God ends all in chapter 18, all of the commerce. I mean, you can read it. It's the luxuries in verse 17, or verse 7, verse 9, the luxuries, everything. Verse 14, "Your, your soul longed for all the things that are rich and splendid are gone." So Satan has always led a global rebellion against God since his fall. And God, in Revelation, judges his rebellion of religion and materialism. That's basically a prophetic view of of the conflict of the ages.

So, so where did religion take on the form we see it today, especially the paganism of the Roman Catholic Church? Right at the Tower of Babel. That's only from Babel onward do we have idols. There are not idols prior to the Tower of Babel. And that is the beginning, the idolatry, the Babylonian mysteries, and organized religion all starts at Babel. Now, how did it start? Well, uh, what, what we have is Semiramis. This is a name you can look up in history, uh, who is known as the wife of chapter 10 of Genesis, Nimrod. And it says Nimrod built Babylon and Asshur and a lot of other great cities. And but it doesn't mention his wife, but history fills in the details. She became, as he was, Nimrod, this mighty conqueror and city and empire builder, kind of the beginning of what we see in the Assyrians and the Babylonians and, and all.

That while he was militarily conquering, she became the religious person in charge of, you know, all those ziggurats and all that worship and the idolatry. And basically, she, with her son Tammuz, were worshiped as a divine mother and son. Now, we're talking about Genesis 11. And religion around the world always has a common element. Pagan religions, they have a mother and a son. A mother, Ashtaroth, you hear about her in the Old Testament, and Baal, you've heard of Baal, you know, the priests of Baal. You've heard of Astarte. That's a mother and a son. Egypt, you've heard of Isis, mother, Horus, her son. Aphrodite, I mean, there you go. You read any Greek mythology and, uh, Roman, you know, writings, and Eros, I mean, mother and son. Venus in the Roman world and Cupid. There's Valentine's Day, right before our eyes. That's the sun. Cupid is the, you know, the fat little, little naked baby is Cupid, and Venus is the statue, the, the one when you go to the museum, you go like that. The mother-son in all of these, it's a fertility, [Music] immorality, pagan, but it's always mother-son. And so all the way through history, we have a mother-son among the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, they all have this mother-son. And what was the original story? Just real quickly with, uh, I mean, I'll give you a, a snapshot of, um, let's see. How do I get this? No, I don't want to go back. I want to go forward. I don't want to go that far. Come on, back up there. There we go. Haven't done this in so long, I can't find. Oh, there it is. Okay, okay. Uh, Semiramis, the mother has a son. He's out fighting. Semiramis, uh, her son Tammuz is out hunting like his dad. Nimrod, a wild boar attacks him, kills him, dismembers him. And Mom feels bad. And she picks up all the pieces of Tammuz and she puts him in a basket by the river for 40 days and mourns. And on the 40th day, he rises from the dead. What a story. Isn't that interesting? That is the backdrop. A form of that is in every one of these religions. If you read carefully the hieroglyphics in Egypt, Isis has a son who dies and becomes, through Osiris, in the Netherworld, comes back to life. A mother gives back her son to hold. And, and it's a mother deity and a son deity, but the mother is the dominant and the son is the lesser. The same thing happens with Aphrodite. The same thing happens with Venus. Especially, you find this in the Bible, uh, um, Old Testament, in all of the, when, when Jezebel imports her her Baal worship from Phoenicia through Ahab, it is a mother-son, sensual resurrection of Baal from the dead after 40 days. So that's just, I mean, the whole world is is immersed in this.

Now, what happens is, uh, 1 Corinthians 10, if we turn there, uh, tells us what Paul's warning was. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 10. And basically, Paul said, watch out. 1 Corinthians 10, starting in verse 19, he says, "And what am I saying? That an idol is anything, or whatever is offered to idols is anything? Rather, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. And I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. Verse 20, You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the Lord's table and the table of demons." What was he talking about? Well, particularly these Greek and Roman gods had temples. Aphrodite was the one that was on the hill above Corinth. This letter, the highest point of of the whole plane that that Corinth sits on, is this gigantic Acrocorinthus, this this mountain, and the top of it was crowned with a temple to Aphrodite. And the people were saying, "Oh, the Christians, they're saying those gods are nothing." And and Paul says, "No, they're not. They're not real. Those aren't people. There isn't an Aphrodite woman. There isn't an Eros son. There isn't a Venus and a Cupid. Those are all fairy tales." Their their mythology. What's behind them? Look at verse 20. "The things the Gentiles sacrifice up there at the Temple of Aphrodite or Venus, they sacrifice to demons and not to God." What he's saying is, behind every religion, every false religion, every idol worshiping religion, whether it's the new tribe they just discovered in the Amazon with the drones, and it's the Stone Age tribe they never knew was there, they have their religion, and they have, they venerate their little images. Behind every image, it says right here, there is a demon. So lurking out there in religions are demons. So that's all I wanted to say.

Now, we have one form of idolatry from this Tammuz-Semiramis thing that starts showing up by this term. Now, let's go to Jeremiah 44. This is fascinating. And, um, the, the, I don't think most people realize, uh, that these chapters, this has kind of been kind of the long book of the Old Testament. A lot of people don't make it through. But, but in Isaiah or Jeremiah 44, look at verse 17. And it says, "But we will certainly do whatever has gone out of our mouth to burn incense to the Queen of Heaven, to pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, the kings and our princes." And on and on. But verse 18, "Since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out our drink offerings, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and the famine." Verse 19, "Queen of Heaven, Queen of Heaven, Queen of Heaven." Then you go on to Ezekiel, and you find, and let's go over to Ezekiel 8:13. So Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, we have this Queen of Heaven. And now Ezekiel 8 and verse 13, and he says, "And look at the abominations my people are doing. Ezekiel 8:13, They brought me to the door of the gate, and to my dismay, the women were sitting there weeping for." What does verse 14 say at the end? What does it say in your Bible? Oh, the Queen of Heaven is named as Tammuz. So now this Semiramis thing has morphed into Israel calling this this Babylonian mystery religion, the Queen of Heaven has a name, and it's all tied to this Babylonian worship. And God says it had infiltrated Israel. And what infiltrated Israel was the mother and the son. Only instead of it being Semiramis, who was the high priest of this whole thing, it became Tammuz and Baal, and they just made Baal the son, and they called Tammuz the Queen of Heaven. You say, "Oh, that's kind of interesting history."

Okay, now let's fast forward to Roman Catholicism. Nearby, just south of us in Mexico, this is directly, this is, you can read this in any history book. This is Mexican lore, mythology. It is believed that Our Lady, that's code in the Roman Catholic Church for Mary, Our Lady, used the Aztec N word, Coa, whatever I can't pronounce it, which is pronounced Quetzalcoatl, and sounds remarkably like the Spanish word Guadalupe. You've heard of Our Lady of Guadalupe. What is the big deal? Why do Roman Catholics revere that? Coa meaning serpent, tl being the noun ending, which can be interpreted "the," while zopatl means to crush or stamp out. So Our Lady of Guadalupe was calling herself the one who crushes the serpent. Now, you've gotten into biblical territory. What does Genesis 3:15 say? That the promised seed of the woman, who is Jesus Christ, Jesus is the one that was going to crush the head of the serpent, and the serpent was going to bruise his heel. What did paganism introduce to the church? That Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, is the one that crushed the serpent. See what has happened in the era of Romanism is that Semiramis and Tammuz came right in. When Constantine in AD 313 legalized Christianity, there were a whole bunch of Semiramis-Tammuz people who had this whole mother-son, and the son dying, and the mother mourning for him for 40 days. Have you ever wondered where this event in the Roman Catholic Church came from? Lent. What is Lent? Lent is is 40 days of mourning. You know, it starts after Mardi Gras, right? Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, uh, then you go into Ash Wednesday, and you're in Lent for 40 days, which ends at what? Easter resurrection. The the pagan 40-day mourning for the the slain son by the wild boar percolated through Egyptian, Greek, Phoenician, and Roman and Babylonian religion, permeating the Roman Empire. And when Constantine couldn't beat the Christians, he had an entire empire of paganism, a church, the Roman Church, the Pantheon, that collected every idol of every god and just had them on the shelf, and there was everybody was equal. And all Constantine and has put his cross in there and merged the pagans with their Lent, with all the Roman practices of burning candles and beads and vestments and miters, wearing those head things. You ever wonder where you watch proceedings in Rome and you go, "What, what are those headdress things? Where that, what chapter is that in?" You know, it says women are to cover their heads. Where, where this? Men wearing these pointy things? And how did the Pope get the the name? You know what the Pope is called? Pontifex Maximus. Do you know what that means? Pontis, pontis is a bridge. So he is the, the bridge-building big one. That was the name of the priests of this whole Babylonian thing. They were called the bridge builders. They built the bridge from the gods to the people. And when Constantine legalized Christianity, all of the pagan practices from Fat Tuesday to Ash Wednesday to 40 days of mourning, uh, culminating in the The rebirth of the son that died from the mother that was to be worshiped, the mother's son, all of that got folded right into Roman Catholicism. Not overnight, but just slowly crept in.

So basically, there's seven vital reasons why I'm not a Roman Catholic. If you examine the doctrine of salvation and compare it to what Romanism says, uh, salvation by Romanism and salvation by the scriptures, you would come up with seven reasons. Because what the early church did, so here's the cross of Christ in the early church, and this is a chronological view of what's happening. The first thing that the church bumped into was the Roman merging with the the church Jesus Christ started, the Holy Catholic Universal Church, and they come up here, and as they round the corner, they get all this paganism, which is works-based. And then they they move along until Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and the whole crowd, and Hus, and and all, they have the Reformation. And so the truth keeps going because, remember, Romanism is 90% plus truth. Uh, we get a higher percentile, you know, 98% truth here. But they didn't get rid of all those traditions. Why do you think infant baptism perpetuates this day in the in the reformed churches? Because Luther didn't clean it out. Because Luther was a Roman Catholic monk, and he was so happy he got as much as he did, he didn't want to ruin everything. And so then we we get down here, and we have our traditions. And now you see where we are, uh, with the the excesses even both of the evangelical church with all the, you know, health, wealth, and and prosperity stuff that fold into the renewal or charismatic church. But this is what we measure everything against. God's word, by the way. Someone asked me last time when I said Calvary's right here, they saw this little word "our Ian." Uh, I was just saying that there's a divide between the evangelicals, between, uh, those that are Augustinian, Calvinistic, and Arminian, uh, that the Tulsa Bible Church would be right here in the box anywhere. So don't worry about that. I wasn't trying to say anything. The mass is unbiblical. We don't need to talk about it. Mike Jenden, Mary is given the attributes of God. Uh, she is prayed to like she can omnisciently, he, and everything, omnipresently come and omnipotently help you. They take their traditions over the word of God. There is the veneration, as in Our Lady of Guadalupe. They don't worship them, they just venerate them and pray to them. There is the unbiblical dispensing of grace infused through the sacraments, which the Bible says is absolutely untrue. There is the false lie of purgatory, that you can live like the devil, die, and have your relatives pray you into heaven, as if they could do such a thing. And then there's the acceptance by the church of all these pagan customs. And I won't even go through all the apparitions and Guadalupe stuff, and even proclaiming that this Pope Pius IX or Pius, as they like to say, proclaimed that Mary is the mediator between God and man. And what does it say in 1 Timothy 2:5 and 6? "For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself." So Jesus offered himself once. The mass is repeated. So that's, in a nutshell, how we got the paganism of Romanism through the merging of the church in 313 AD and the gradual bringing in of Lent, and then of purgatory, and then of the sacraments, and then of transubstantiation in that long decline. But it's 7:15, so it's time to go. So let's all stand. Uh, basically, this, I would encourage you next week, uh, we're having a special conference, uh, uh, that is going to focus completely on how to share the gospel with these 50, 60 million people that live around us that are Roman Catholics. And we have a Roman Catholic evangelist, former Roman Catholic studying for the priesthood, his name is Mike Jenden. He was here, uh, four or five years ago or more, and he's coming back and doing two morning services and the evening service. And of course, we'll have our normal communion, uh, in the evening service. But he's going to come and actually equip us for this year of reaching out, especially as Casio is preparing for a Reformation Day, October 31st, you know, 2017, they want to have the Wings Stadium thing and say that we're all Christians. It will help us prepare to know what the gospel is and how to share it and how to lovingly tell people, "Hey, have you ever read The Gospel according to Peter and Paul in the Bible? I'd like to share it with you."