History of Relationships Between Church & Government

As we look into this subject, history of the relationship between church and government, there's a few things we need to kind of look at foundationally, okay? And one of those is just this picture here. Religion and government, there has been an historic pattern. And that historic pattern starts off like this. Secular history records for us that it's just been a pattern throughout history that church and government, as religion maybe is a better way to put it, and government have been connected. in the past, and the only way that that's been an exception in any great degree has been just in the last couple of centuries. That the pattern has been throughout the centuries to have religion and government connected.

And we find that was true of a lot of the governments in the Old and New Testament. As we read through the scripture, that's the pattern we find. Some Old and New Testament nations and empires had the ruler worshiped as God. That was true of Egypt, true of Rome, and Babylon. And so that's been a pattern that's well established.

And I think that's something just to kind of keep in mind is our perspective as we look at this church and government relationship. What the church was doing may have been unbiblical in many cases, as we'll see, but it was simply carrying on the worldly pattern. Now, let's take a look. Oh, excuse me. This is the first period. The apostolic period, 30 through 96 is the time frame.

And the background there, Judaism had an exception, a legal exception, to the usual Roman laws. Because Judaism was a monotheistic religion, they were forbidden to acknowledge other gods. And initially, the church was just seen as a minor group within Judaism, and so the Romans didn't pay particular attention. didn't bother them any because Judaism already had some groups within it, right? What were those groups? Can you think of them?

Sadducees, good. Another? And the Pharisees, yeah, alright. There's also the Essenes, a group that you don't, because they're kind of reclusive, you don't see a lot in scripture, but there's evidence of them. And there are other, Simon the Zealot, there's Zealots, so there's a bunch of subgroups within Judaism.

And so the Romans just kind of looked at it as, it must be another one of those Jewish groups. So they didn't pay any real attention. It was also initially, remember for the first 10 years of the church, approximately speaking, the church remained in Jerusalem or among Jewish groups. It remained in Israel so that you didn't have it as a distinguished group apart from Judaism. The Jews, then, however, began to express increasing resistance towards having the Christians seen as a group within Judaism.

The other thing that happened is Gentiles began to dominate the numbers as time went on. Chapter 10 of Acts begins the church, including the Gentiles. From that point onward, the Gentiles grew and began to outnumber the Jews. By the end of the first century, the largest church in the Roman Empire was that in Rome, and it was largely non-Jews.

Here are some basic New Testament teachings on government. The idea in scripture is to be subject to the government with the understanding that authority is given by God. That was something clearly taught in the New Testament. Pay your taxes. By the way, some folks will, you may hear folks, even Christian folks, say, well, boy, these taxes are voluntary, we don't have to pay them. The tax that Jesus had Peter go fishing for, get the coin out of the fish's mouth, that was a voluntary tax, and Jesus said, pay it so we don't offend them. So, anyway, there's the established pattern.

The only basis, biblically, for setting aside government mandate is if the government mandate is contrary to the clear teachings of the Lord. than the Lord being the higher authority is what we should be following. So, just some introductory teachings there. Before we step into the next one, there's something I want to bring up. It's not on your slides, but it's exceedingly important. And that's this.

Where are a believer's blessings? Where is a believer's blessings? In the heavenlies, okay? We'll be seeing later on as we study Philippians, where is our citizenship? In the heavens. When you look at it, the New Testament teaching keeps coming back to this point. The church is a heavenly people. What the church started deviating from when we leave the apostolic period, and they did it quickly, is they began thinking of themselves as an earthly people. and therefore started getting linked up with the earthly government confusing the two. The animosity between the Roman government and the church prevented that from sinking its roots into the church but once Rome embraced Christianity it spread like wildfire and the understanding that the churches of heavenly people got lost in great part. That will explain a good deal of what we're about to look at here. Let's take a look at the next part. Here's one, and you've got a copy. It looks similar, not identical. And it's a special handout as well as a slide.

What this is, is a letter beginning in the second century Here is Pliny, who has this area up in Vicinia and Pontus. He's got that area to govern, and he is writing to the Emperor Trajan. And he's saying, I'm not familiar with how we deal with these Christians. And so he's kind of looking for some guidance.

Anyway, you have that correspondence. Very interesting. It shows that Rome kind of took a while to really take notice, and that the persecutions were something that were not widespread or pervasive yet. They tended to be kind of local and sporadic for a time. And anyway, you can look at that in further detail. Real interesting. I mean, here's a piece of correspondence. It's very clear as to what's going on.

One of the things just to kind of get an idea of here is about 250 is when the persecutions against the Christians turn empire-wide. And that's official persecutions. There was always an issue with the Christians being at odds with the culture. And that began right away once Christianity began moving out into the culture. But it became official and widespread around 250 until 313 when Christianity was made the official religion and the tables were turned.

It flipped entirely the other way. So we see the relationship between church and government going from animosity to one of being embraced. Overnight. For a lot of the Christians it was a shock. It's like, man, here we are fighting for our lives, you know, and then all of a sudden we get the red carpet treatment. And a lot of them, boy, had a hard time dealing with it. Some didn't deal with it very well.

One of the things that was happening during this period of time when the church was being Persecuted increasingly, the Roman government required what's called a libelous. You had to have one of these. It's certified that you had done the required emperor worship. You had to have that. If the officials came to you and they said, hey, have you got your libelous? And they would come to them and they would say, no, I don't have it. Well, you've got a problem. Here was the Roman idea.

To them, everybody is polytheistic. You just make room for another god, and that's no problem. We don't want to offend you. You have whatever gods you want. But you've got to do this. And not to have one, not to have done this, was considered unpatriotic. You've got to be patriotic. And so to be patriotic, the Star-Spangled Banner won't do. You've got to have this piece of paper.

There were temples to the emperors. Pergamum, Domitian, in Ephesus. The major cities had multiple temples to the emperor, and the emperor would even pay the money to build the temple. But you had to go there. You had to get your certificate. Here were some accusations against the Christians.

And let's see where they came from. One, that they were cannibals. Where would that come from? What's that? Yes, this is my body, this is the blood. Well, those Christians are cannibals. They're drinking blood and eating people. Okay, alright. How about the next one? Disruption of business. Can you think of an instance of that in the New Testament? What's that? Jesus at the temple would be one. Good, there's others. What's that? Okay, what happened at Philippi? Okay, here's the servant girl. Here's Paul and this servant girl had this special ability And all of a sudden, gone. And he was real disruptive. Good. What else? Can you think of others? At Ephesus, what happened there? Ah. Made the idols in Ephesus. It's damaging our idol business.

Okay. All right. So there's another one. How about the next one? Incest. Can you imagine? How would they get that claimed against them? Ah, yeah, here, one brother would meet another, you know, across the, you know, marketplace. Hey, John, Brother John, good to see you. Oh, and Sister Mary, how wonderful. And then you find them getting married, you know. Brother John, Sister Mary, or something like that.

What is this? You know, this is really weird. So, that claim. About anti-family. How would the Christians be called anti-family? Okay, yeah. There would be positions where here would be a believer, that believer would become identified with Christ, and all of a sudden there was no appeal. Wait a minute, you're not going to the temple with us. Of course you've got to do this emperor worship and get your certificate, right? No. So all of a sudden you'd have families split over this issue. Well, that's anti-family. It was the Roman and Greek thing to do to have all these gods and just make room for another one. To say, no, just this, and not the others. That's anti-family.

Okay. How about the next one? Atheism. Why would they be called atheists? Ah, yes. You don't believe in our gods? Oh, heavens, you're an atheist! Say? Yes? Okay, yeah, in other words, we have our gods, and you're not believing in our gods, so you're an atheist. That's right. Okay. Now, lack of patriotism. What would that be? That's right, you don't worship the emperor, you refuse to get one of these certificates, you're horribly unpatriotic. It's like refusing to salute the flag.

That was the Roman thought on this thing. Antisocial behavior. We used to have these meetings, and everybody would have their guild meetings in the temple, and we'd do all the temple sacrifices, and you never come anymore. See that? You're antisocial.

We have these worship parades of Dionysius. Everybody in town gets drunk and you're not any fun anymore now that you've become a Christian. Or, cause of disasters. You've offended the Roman gods. You've offended the Greek gods. They're mad at us because you won't do any of the things you used to. And so now if we have an earthquake or a storm, you are the cause of it. It is the gods judging us.

The Christians did it. You see that? Now, if you go down the list, at first it looks like, well, that's a crazy list. But once you begin understanding the Greek and Roman mind, it all makes sense. So to them, there's a whole long list of things to point to the Christians and say, you are a problem. The Christian teaching and belief was at radical contrast with the culture.

Now, let's look at the next period of time here. We talked about this before, so I won't go over this in detail, but just to cover it, just a reminder that there was this split taking place in the Roman Empire. Initially, it was just an administrative thing to try to better handle the distances from one end to the other. Because remember, the empire was going from England, Britain, all the way down to the Persian Gulf. And just running from one end to the other was a tough thing. So in order to better administer things, they broke the empire in half. It was an administrative step that seemed to make sense initially.

But as time went on, the government broke up and the church, which got tied to the government and followed the government, did the same splitting. One of the points we made here is that the Roman Empire was called the Pontiff Maxim. And that's this coin you see here on the right. We pointed this out before, but just so we don't lose it. Pontiff. Maxim, and of course the full Latin is Pontifex Maximus. That has also become the title of the Pope of Rome.

Christianity was declared legal in the Roman Empire in 312, then the official religion in 313, then in 324 the only allowed religion. Something to keep in mind here is that that was nice for Constantine to declare, but remember that the Roman Empire was split in two, and the administration was not necessarily smooth. Even after he declared Christianity legal, portions of the empire with resistant administrators still carried on persecution.

Isn't that strange? We talked about pagan temples and symbols being converted to Christian symbols. This temple here, for example, is one we know got turned from a pagan temple into a church. Or the cross over the sun disk for the sun god. Here are some changes from 312 to 590.

There was a continuing decline in the political unity and the military power of the Roman Empire. And here, this is interesting, here they had taken over Britain and that main attack took place 43 AD, New Testament times. That was about the same time that the Gentiles were brought into the church. Rome assaulted Britain.

That's an interesting story we don't have time to go into. 407, here they are, centuries later, pulling the troops out. Rome is starting to collapse. They can't get troops to be out on these frontier areas. They're lacking the financial resources, they're having a tough time keeping things together, they're getting attacks from other barbarian groups. And what do we find?

In 410 AD, Innocent I, the Bishop of Rome, persuades Alaric the Visigoth to pillage Rome, but not burn it. So now instead of fighting the enemy, you plead with him. You bargain with him. Guess what? Happens again. 452, Leo I persuades Attila the Hun to leave Rome untouched and to move on.

It happened that Atoll the Hun had a huge, massive epidemic among his troops and couldn't do much anyway, but it made the Bishop of Rome look like a hero. Then, 455, just a few years later, Leo I persuades Gaiseric the Vandal to only pillage, but not burn Rome. Rome is unable to defend itself and the Bishop of Rome is looking pretty good. We don't have any soldiers to defend Rome, but boy, these guys sure do a good job of talking us out of a lot of trouble. They only took our stuff, they didn't rape all the women and burn everything.

Then by 550 AD, the empire was falling apart, coming apart at the seams. It was already bad, but it was getting to be ridiculous by that point. Shifting military powers. taking over portions of the old Roman Empire by that point in time. And the Roman Church adopted the form of the old Roman government. So that's the chart that you have in your handout there. Here is the Emperor, Pontifex Maximus, and now the Pope is called Pontifex Maximus. The Roman government had a Senate, the Roman Church took on the College of Cardinals, and on down the list. basically taking the old Roman structure and adapting it for the church. Now into the 590 to 517 is kind of the medieval period. What you see here, and you have it as a special handout because I know the small slide is a little hard to see. Here's the emerging power of the church.

You find this Leo I. Remember, he was the one that went out and began doing this negotiating with the attackers to Rome. Here's a memorial coin to Attila and Gaiseric, the two leading attackers of Rome during his period of time. What we see in the next centuries is now the Bishop of Rome is crowning the kings. Now it's the Bishop of Rome who is handing off the authority to each of the kings. And we see this pattern continuing through the centuries that follow. And then, pardon? These are the popes through this period of time. These are the popes.

On the black column That's dealing with some of the specific points, for example, Charlemagne being crowned by Leo III. And that picture you see there is the crowning of Charlemagne by the Pope. So here's now the Pope being the one who does the crowning and granting of authority. Then finally you see the real power grab, the Unum Sanctum Declaration by Boniface.

And it goes like this, and you have a copy of it in your handout, too. I'm going to jump down to the bold print. Furthermore, we declare, state, and define that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of all human beings that they submit to the Roman Pontiff. Notice the term there, the Pontiff, and that's a part of the statement.

And all that was was grabbing the Roman authority and the Roman title. By the way, where did that title Pontifex Maximus or Pontiff Maxim come from? It was a title that the chief priests of the Babylonians used. So it got adopted by the Emperor and ultimately by the Pope. That's where it came from as a Babylonian priesthood, pagan priesthood of polytheism.

In the Crusades, the Church's supposed replacement of Israel made the Church think that taking back the land was its rightful place. Instead of saying, you've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, it's, we've got to have the land because the land is, well, that's a part of who we are and we deserve it. It's a part of the Church absorbing what was due Israel.

Basically, I say why there are periods of turbulence. We mentioned last time, for example, that there was at one point in time three popes, all claiming power. Basically what happened was the organized church continued to maintain its political ties. That's the principle here. The church issued edicts, told kings what to do. Religious deviance was enforced by the organized church's police power through the political system.

And we'll go into that next week when we get into persecution and how that was carried out. In the eastern areas where the Orthodox Church, particularly the Russian Orthodox Church, held power, from Prince Vladimir's conversion in 988, Russian royalty was connected to the Orthodox Church. And then especially it accelerated in 1500 up to the Russian Revolution. were involved with the Church's actions, eventually coming to a point where the Church was just a segment of the Russian government. Now, we get into the Reformation period.

This is Western Church political alliances. The Roman Catholic Church, Lutheran Church, and Reformed Church established and maintained political and military alliances. The Catholic Church had its military alliances. And those military and political people who were refusing the Pope now had a religion that they could connect up with.

If they resented the Pope's power, they said, well, we're Lutherans now, or we're reformers now. And so what happened is it was not so much a religious thing for many of them as it was Here's a banner that we can gather around and oppose Rome, because we don't like what they do, and we don't like them crowning us and how they go about controlling things. Nonetheless, what happened is many of the reformers ended up just aligning themselves with the political and military powers that be. Here's, for example, we brought up last time this Castle Coburg in Germany. It's one of the places where Luther ran to. The song, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, written here.

The Anabaptists, however, took no stand. They didn't make military and political alliances. They specifically said, we don't want to do that. And one of the ways that they went about expressing that is they were often pacifists. That was their way of saying, I'm not getting connected up with one political group or another.

And so as a consequence, they ended up being attacked by those who had the alliances, whatever they were, Lutheran, Reformed. Roman Catholic, all of them attacked the Anabaptists, because the Anabaptists had no alliance. The Anabaptists were basically breaking the pattern, based on what they saw in scripture, of what had been carried on for centuries, where government and religion was always tied together. But for doing so, they paid a heavy price, as we'll see next week.

Here's St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. It was built during the Protestant Reformation. There was no Reformation among the Orthodox countries. Didn't happen. But there was still this political alliance. And basically this was built with the great assistance of the Russian government. And we need to collect our tax money. Why? So we can build this cathedral. So that was their thought, and then they had that, you know, the taxes were for the military and the cathedral and all the other functions of government in the Russian government. Okay.

Stepping into the present. After the Peace of Westphalia, remember the Peace of Westphalia was at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Here's a good portion of Europe just decimated. I think Helmut, were you telling me about some of the statistics on the millions that were killed? 30 million. This 30 years war was horrible. It wasn't just a little bit of conflict here and there. Millions and millions lost their lives.

I talked to one gal in Carson City who had some Ancestry over in Germany, and she says she has some records where they would say you know look out the Lutherans are coming Look out the Catholics are coming It would just be back and forth and a lot of the villagers would just be you know crazy trying to figure out What's going on and trying to protect themselves running from the attacks, but millions and millions were slaughtered over this If they keep the soldiers came in they didn't know who was on what side they just kill them all That was the philosophy kill them all And it got pretty nasty. It went back and forth here.

So the peace of Westphalia, finally the government said, let's stop fighting over all this stuff. If they kept going the way they were going, there'd be nobody left to fight over or with, because it was going to be a huge slaughter. It was nasty. So what happened then is this war between the domains largely ended. There were actually a couple of other agreements during that year as well, but that's the main one, called the Peace of Westphalia, and they finally settled after basically generations of war.

That, however, did not stop political control within a domain. See the difference? It's no longer just fighting over who has charge of what territory, but they're settled Alright, we're going to be this, you're going to be that, we're not going to fight over it, so that's ended. But within each political domain, each political domain was free to try to enforce its religious control over each group and to have the church still aligned with a political and military group within that. So, many governments maintain religious alliances, controls, and financial support for specific churches. That stayed on, even though all the infighting had stopped. So this is a map that we've shown before. This is 52 years after the Peace of Westphalia.

You see those areas in purple were basically under control of Catholic groups. Then they had, on the eastern end, you've got some Muslim and Orthodox groups. And then you see the kind of tan areas to the north, and you're looking at largely Lutheran control. And then some reform control in the Swiss and Dutch areas. And then also Scotland. So you see different political boundaries had still settled out. Different areas were still a certain religion by political and military control. They had just stopped the fighting between the different areas.

Something we want to take a look at here. This is shifting gears a bit. Because as we get into the modern era, what happened is something rather radical. The idea is that you could have a government, and that government wouldn't be aligned with a church. That's only been in the last few centuries. That's even been a thought. So let's take a look at this. This is the theistic view of government. And I would say this is largely Christian, although the Judeo-Christian view fits in with this.

The first one is that God exists as revealed in scripture. That's the first assumption. That's a philosophical point. Moral absolutes exist based on God's character as revealed in scripture. That's an assumption from a theistic point of view. Mankind is sinful and apart from the life and salvation of God will express that sinfulness. The basic philosophical point of view.

And then governmental authority is given by God. That's what our Lord said to Pilate, right? And then finally, there is therefore a basis and need for moral definition in law. And that 1 Timothy 1, 8-10 spells out, here's Paul writing to Timothy, the law does have a place and where it does is to constrain evil.

Largely, his focus there is looking at unbelievers. This is a theistic view of government, and this had been something that had been previously understood, but the idea that it was so intricately connected, church and government, was something that was finally being broken loose in people's thinking. The naturalistic view of government is what really got started rolling into the 1600s and 1700s. And what is that all about?

God does not exist. Well, that's a different idea. God does not exist or has not revealed himself so as to be known. Kind of an atheistic agnostic view or maybe a deist view. There are no moral absolutes. By the way, unbelievers out there today, how many think that's the majority view of unbelievers today? There are no moral absolutes. You think that's pretty much the case? Now, among believers, do you think most believers think that there are or aren't moral absolutes? Isn't it interesting? Statistics show that the majority of those who call themselves Christians today think there are no moral absolutes. Among Christian youth groups in this country, less than 10% believe in moral absolutes.

How about that? You didn't give us the reason. Pardon? You didn't give us the reason. Aha! Can you give us the reason? They do not look upon scripture as the standard. Instead of scripture being inspired in God's revelation, the perspective here, even among those who would call themselves Christians, they would say scripture is inspiring. You see the difference? Huge difference.

And that's why it's being basically lost, not slowly, but by a landslide. Finally, ethics and law are based on man's own determinations. I'm the one who decides what's right and what's wrong. And that's only basically by, do I have the power or not? And what's practical? That's this word pragmatism. What's practical?

And that's the way a great deal of our society is looking at things. That's the perspective that is more and more taking over. And I think as we look at how people are dealing with things, which view, this view or this one, is controlling our society?

Which one is calling the shots? What is happening is Christians are shifting to this view by their understanding of scripture or the lack of it. They're shifting to this view and embracing it. And where did this whole thing start? Not recognizing themselves as a heavenly people. So now they're looking at how do I deal with things as an earthly people from an earthly viewpoint. This is where Christians are moving and shifting. That's the direction that Christendom is going.

Okay. Here's an interesting thing. We still carry around these things. It's interesting, we'll put that in various places, but good heavens, don't mention it in the classroom, right? The shift, yeah? I'm sorry. The shift that has taken place in our own, you know, government and what's allowed in the schools and things like that. I remember when I was in high school, the principal dismissed all classes to an assembly three times a year so that a pastor could come in and teach the school, okay? Imagine what would happen to a principal if he tried that now. See, the shift has been huge. And this entire shift in thinking is going in the direction of the naturalistic thinking to where now we've just got some highly challenged ink and print on coin and paper. Now, among Christians there is also a great divide, and it falls this way.

Dispensationalists see the world This world is hopeless until Christ returns literally on earth at the Father's appointed time. Until then, we're not going to make this any sort of a heaven on earth. And this is not going to be a place that Christians are going to control and make better. Government is just a hedge against evil, but it's not going to make things into heaven on earth.

Contrary to that, there are groups of Christians out now, post-millennialists would be the main category within this view. They see things getting better and better as the church takes control through political power. And so they'll push this Christian candidate, or that one, and say, see, we're going to make things so good that Jesus just has to come back. That's the view.

So among Christians, there's not only the divide, is there absolute truth or not absolute truth, but there's also the divide here. Are we going to make things better and better by taking control of the government and using the government to make this a heaven on earth, a heavenly kingdom? Or is it simply going to have to wait and the place of government is only as a hedge against evil? until the Lord comes. That's the divide that even Christians are going off in two very different directions about. And one of the things that has happened as well is some of those who were in the group of things are hopeless until the Lord comes have been shifting over to the we're going to make things better and better.

So, real interesting. Where's this headed, folks? Where's this headed? Here's what God thinks, okay? I can refer to scripture and say, here's what God thinks, right? Here's 2 Timothy 3, verses 13-17, starting in verse 13 of course, but evil men and imposters will proceed from better and better, right? From bad to better, right? No, what does he say? From bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. Does that sound to you like downhill or uphill? It sounds like downhill to me.

We're not going to clean it up with government. Taking control of government isn't going to fix it. Instead, what does he end up pointing Timothy to here? What do you see at the end of that passage? What's Paul's direction? Here's God's Word. God's Word has been revealed from the Lord, and that is in the believer's life. effective for these various things and profitable.

But there's no indication here, expect things to get better and better from believers controlling the government. There's no indication from scripture that that's going to be the case. As we look at this whole thing between church and government, the big picture issue is the church seeing itself as a heavenly people. seeing that our blessings are in heavenly places.

And is it a percentage of blessings? No, it's every spiritual blessing is in the heavenly places. And as long as we keep that in mind by beholding the Lord, that's where it's at. It's not just a matter of cataloging the blessings. But by beholding the Lord, then this issue of trying to get connected up with the government and trying to reform the world through controlling the government goes away. Because we end up understanding that government has a place for here and now, but it's passing. And our linking up with that government is not biblically founded as the means of controlling things or maintaining things or keeping our country Christian or anything of the sort. but instead it is understanding where we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. Where is our citizenship?

That's the New Testament message. And after centuries some believers are finally understanding what was taught during the first century in the very book that we study here this morning. Next week we'll be taking a look at the next step in this here where it's the history of freedom, martyrdom, and persecution will be the next part of it. It's kind of the other side of this coin, isn't it?

Because what happened in the early church is the government was opposed to Christians in great part. And so we see that persecution. And then when the tables turned with Constantine's declaration, the church lost sight of its heavenly blessings. Within less than a century, the church began being the main persecutor of Christians. And that has been true up until the last couple of centuries. The church has been the main persecutor of Christians from around the 4th century up until about two centuries ago. Nancy? The organized church. Yes, thanks for that. Yes, really it's been the church at large. As we'll see next week, the Lutheran and Reform groups were horrible to the Anabaptists. Pardon? I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah.

And I think if you look at what's the root of this? Why did they go off track so badly? Why do you find Why do you find people who are of Reformed background drowning Anabaptists and burning them? Why would that take place? And it starts back at the root, the losing the understanding that we're heavenly people. That's the root of the problem. That's where it began. As soon as the church began to see themselves as an earthly people, it put them opposed to those who saw themselves as a heavenly people. And I think in many cases what you had was Christians killing and burning and drowning Christians. Sad.

Okay, we'll get to that next week. And just a reminder, Nancy's got some of those CDs. If we run short, because I only made a few of them, let me know and we can get more. My intent, when we're all done, is I'll give you PowerPoint CDs for all the slides, so you can use that if you like. We'll end up with something as you do the math real quick here. We'll end up with something Hundreds of slides easily probably you know five to eight hundred slides something like that, so it'll be a lot also adding to that Shams history of the Christian Church, which is a volume set in itself on the same CD and And Fox's Book of Martyrs and a number of other public domain things will pack up the CD and give you lots to work with there. So the idea is that you'll have not only the binder, but if you have use and access to the computer, lots that you can work with and hopefully organize well enough that you can find things.

Any questions here before we call it an end? Yeah, Bob? So I've got, first of all, a question about Yeah. I would not dispute that at all. Matter of fact, readily embrace it. Yes. Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, okay. Sure. Yeah, okay. Yes. Yeah. And the question comes up, as we consider going to the polls, or we consider standing on the precedent of focus on the family, or these issues that are, quote, I think, viscerally based to a larger scale. Sure.

I mean, how do you transcend this kind of separation of church and state, because I'm in total favor of not having any influence of government on the church, nor church on the government. I mean, how do we transcend this in the way we thought about the life of this non-deliberative platform? I mean, I agree with your perspective a hundred percent. We're a federalist system, and that is the end of the subject. We're not going to go further than that. But do we take positions and stances on issues that relate to this institution?

I think, just back up to a few different things that you brought up. Well, let's cover them. One, let's talk about just this last week with the gay fellow, the proclaimed gay, being made a bishop. A couple of things. One is people are making a big issue over him being gay.

That certainly is an issue, but here I've got a prior problem, even before that even comes up. What biblical basis is there for a bishop? In other words, if the position you're putting them in was off the track even before you decide to put a gay in there. So you had a prior issue. And it's the two wrongs don't make a right.

Anyway, that's one. I think the other thing is if you look at it, we reach here, let me flip back to it. You reach this philosophical divide. I'm going to have to go through it this way, I think. The philosophical divide that we get is, is the church in a position to try to make everything better? And is that our goal? Are we going to make things so good that when Jesus comes back, he'll just say, boy, you did a great job. Or are we looking at basically, you know, standing our ground, as Paul puts it in Ephesians 6, standing our ground until He comes? And is it one or the other?

And I think the point, if you look at the New Testament position, where obviously the church had no place to go and influence the government substantially, the church needs to not lose sight that the primary focus of the gospel is upon individual hearts.

And those individual hearts are then going to add to the church, and the focus of the church is building up the body of Christ. First keep that as our primary focus. We're building up the body of Christ, and those believers as individuals and as a group will have an impact as the Lord sees fit. But we don't make it the church's primary goal to go out there and we're going to impact this and impact that and get behind this candidate and get a Christian president in and all the other things that we try to do.

I think that's one point. If you look throughout the New Testament, there was a sense of, yes, you are lights, but the light is drawing people to the gospel, not making everything better. And as to dealing with kings, here's Paul writing to Timothy, and what did he say? Pray for them. Why? So that there will be peace. Why? So that we can spread the gospel.

That Paul's message was gospel-focused, not make the world better-focused. And boy, the Church real easily gets off of it. I would say substantially, like the Episcopal, the Methodist Church, a lot of the Churches are kind of that branch. The Reformed Church has gotten off in the, we're going to make things better philosophy, and gotten distracted from the gospel, and gotten distracted from beholding Jesus Christ.

Yeah. Sure. And I think... Yes. Yeah. Sure. Yes. Yes. We have the opportunity to, at these various issues, to present the gospel. What happens is believers fall short of that and make making the world better a high priority. There is the reversal that catches us. There is the thing that knocks us off balance. When we say that the end goal is to make things better, when we say that the end goal is to make the world a purer, better, nicer place, and now put the gospel somewhere down the list, then we've lost it.

Is that addressing the issue or the question? Other questions? Thoughts? Yeah? I have a question about how well we live with the Chinese day. Okay. focus of the prophecy of the Bible here, instead of focusing on the result of the Scripture. Does that make sense? Sure.

In other words, you're saying that if we look for impact, and the impact is our focus, then we've taken our focus off the Lord. Yeah, because what's happening is, you can't make the Word of God if you don't feel it. If we don't deal with the spiritual issues? If we don't deal with people's spiritual standing before the Lord?

Yeah. Sure, and in spite of the claims that the Roman government had against the early Christians, as we went through them, you saw that that's a misunderstanding, right? One after the other, misunderstanding. In the end, one of the things that the Christians told the Roman government in the second and third centuries is the Christian is the ideal citizen. The Christian will be subject to the government, pay the taxes, the Christian will deal ethically, we're your least problem. And they were able to say that because the impact of Christianity was to make better citizens, but it was because the believers understood that they ultimately had heavenly citizenship. And that's the reason for the difference.

Sure. Okay. All right. Good. Okay. Welcome. And your name? Patrick. Okay. I'm Vern. And I won't introduce everybody here, but you get to meet. Yeah, Patrick. Good. Other thoughts, questions? Clarifications? Okay, next week we'll go into how this government and church interconnect moved over into the area of persecution. Let's pray. Lord, thank you that we are a heavenly people. Thank you for the spiritual blessings that we have that are in the heavenlies, every single one, unfathomable. Lord, we just give you praise for that, and as we walk here upon the earth, We pray that we would learn and grow and understand what that means to be those heavenly citizens, looking upon things on earth from where we've been seated with you. We give you praise for it all. In Jesus' name, amen.