History of Missions
Vern Peterman · Sep 21, 2003
Church History, No. 12
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826225912035

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We're going to be going this morning, our topic is the history of missions. Frankly, as I was going through this, I had a real hard time picking out different things because there are so many things that you could go into. I was telling Nancy last night, I said, man, this is the toughest one because there are so many different areas you could go. Frankly, a lot of what goes on in missions, we'll see here in a bit, reflects the state of the church too. And that makes it difficult. You may say you have a missionary somewhere, but what is that missionary telling people?

Key question. So anyway, we'll be taking a look at that here. Okay? Now, start off Matthew 28. This is one that's frequently referenced as sort of a command. And boy, whole messages have been kind of on the wrong emphasis here. Let's walk through it.

And Jesus came up and spoke to them saying, this is the disciples, he's resurrected, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Some key points in this are, one, is go in the Greek is not an imperative. Whole messages have been delivered on go as if it were a command. It isn't. The Greek there is as you are going. However, there it says, and make disciples. That is an imperative. Make disciples. That's the imperative.

And notice it's not make converts but make disciples, okay? Real important difference, significant difference here. Good morning! Make sure you grab the handout there, we don't want you to be short on that account, and they'll be able to track with us a little better, okay? Then notice too, the focus there, teaching them to observe. There's this discipling, there's this teaching that's to go on, and that's a key focus here. It's not just make disciples, excuse me, it's not just make converts, And it is explicitly focused not on the command to go, but in that process you want people who are disciples that are taught. Very important and significant difference. It's often lost when we look at missions. Now, one of the other passages that jumps out at us here, Acts 1-8, but you speaking again to the disciples just before Christ's ascension into heaven.

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth." And if you step through that, here's Jerusalem. Where are they? Just right outside Jerusalem. They're looking at it. They're standing on the Mount of Olives. They're looking at Jerusalem. So here it is, at Jerusalem, right here.

And then Judea, which is the area right around it. Judea is over here, okay? and then Samaria, and then the ends of the earth, way off the map. Interesting, Samaria is one of the places you're going to go, and that was one of the places Jews didn't go. For example, you're traveling here, and going down to Jerusalem, you travel around Samaria, you don't walk through it. If you have to walk extra days, and you did, you walk around Samaria.

Jesus said, no, you'll be my witnesses in it. Romans 11, 1, 13, the first part of the verse, but I am speaking to you who are Gentiles inasmuch as I am an apostle of Gentiles. The point there that Paul had a specific appointment separate from what we just read in Matthew and in Acts 1. He had a separate appointment because he didn't come along until later, right? Acts 9.

And so then his place was to bring this unique gospel message to the Gentiles. You have on your handout there as well Paul's first missionary journey. He is sent from Antioch and makes this kind of loop trip and then back to Antioch. He heads into the southern part of what we now call Turkey. On the loop back is when he is appointing elders in each of the churches. Second missionary journey, and what we have is represented on the right side is a few of the cities along the path.

And Paul makes another journey. He basically goes through Tarsus. Real interesting, Paul is from Tarsus, but we never heard any big account of him spending a lot of time there. Real interesting. Instead he goes back through some of these same cities he's seen in the first visit, and then extends it elsewhere. Goes farther into Troas and Ephesus.

Philippi in that loop, as we're studying on Sunday morning. Everybody together so far? Holding in there? Makes sense? Tracking? Alright. Next, on the third missionary journey, he widens the loop a little more, goes through some of the same cities, and then extends it down into Athens and Corinth.

It's over where he gets with the Bereans. These are the ones who were more noble because they searched the scriptures to see if what he said was true. Make sure you get handouts there, those of you who are just joining us. And we have off to the left side, Philippi and Antioch and Lystra. These are the places, some of them are now still cities, others are just archaeological ruins, but these represent some of the places along this third missionary journey. Lystra is the area where he picked up Timothy on an earlier trip there in Acts 16. Then Paul's journey to Rome, and a nice little journey on a map. The only thing is, it was real strung out, and lots of incidents. Remember, because he had the ship travel along the way.

It's a little tough to see in here because it's gray, but see that squiggly line? Don't take those squiggles too seriously. We don't exactly know what that path was. But one thing that's clear is the place where he started from, and places along the route, even beyond what we see here, those are all places that have been excavated and identified and places that we know well. All right, then finally this release journey, now I put this map up here, but one thing to note, and I think it's on your handout as well, is the exact timing and route, these are more speculative because a lot of them are not as well defined from scripture directly, as to exactly where he went and when and that sort of thing.

So just kind of keep that in mind. A lot of it is done by implication rather than direct statement. All right. Now, we talked some time ago, I mean weeks ago, two months ago, something like that, about whatever happened to the apostles. And so we had a handout at that point in time that kind of walked through that story. In the area of missions, one of the things we look at is where did they go? We have the accounts in Acts, but those are fairly limited.

We know that Judas and James, the son of Zebedee, their deaths are recorded in scripture. Judas never got into the book of Acts, even. James, the son of Zebedee, remember, was killed by the sword, so that's recorded in Acts. The end of the rest of them is not recorded.

We know most about Peter and Paul, of these that are mentioned here. What's interesting though is the extra-biblical accounts that we have indicate that these guys went all over the place. And some of them are more reliable than others. Some of them are a little tough to determine exactly if this is a true account or not. But there are some interesting indications, and we don't have time to go through them all.

One of them I ran across was this. The apostles take the gospel to China. Bible story depictions have been found in Eastern Han dynasty tombstones in China dating from 86 AD. How about that? Very interesting. Even some evidence in India. Thomas, according to extra-biblical accounts, went to India. I met a fellow, his name was Dr. Fox. He had been a pastor over in India. And the people in India who are Christians will tell you, yes, we are here because of the Apostle Thomas coming. Really amazing.

So there are even some accounts debated of making the Gospel to Japan, even in the first century, and also to England as well. Some of those, again, are debated because the character of the account is not such that we can confirm it real well or say, yes, this is a reliable account.

Alright, now, stepping into the time just after the New Testament era, this is where the church was located within the Roman Empire, about 100. These are from either biblical accounts or extra-biblical accounts that indicate that there was a church there about that time. This doesn't include those like, for example, India and China that are outside of the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean area. By this time, the church in Rome was already the largest church in terms of the numbers of people and beginning to get well established. During this time, we see several Bible translations in foreign languages already have taken place.

Can you imagine? This is a time when you're going to do that Bible translation the hard way. All right, now take your pen and stick it in that ink there, which is kind of homemade ink made from soot and maybe some either water or some gum arabic. And now we'll translate that and write on a piece of papyrus. We had a sample of that here a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago, so you could see that. So this is a tough job. Nonetheless, we find these translations. Yes?

The Church of Rome, made up primarily of Jewish Mostly Gentile. One of the things that happened, and you'll find it recorded in Acts, Claudius booted the Jews out of Rome. And so that meant if you were a Jewish Christian, you were booted out of Rome. So there were Jews, but at different times they had a tough time, and that was one of them.

So mostly Gentile still. So there are these translations that indicate Even though we don't have specific records, that indicates that the gospel is going out to people of other languages and in other areas where the usual language of this part of the Roman Empire, Greek, was not spoken.

Here's something that's real interesting. We tend to think in terms of evangelists that have big names. We tend to think in terms of big church mission programs or missions organizations. We don't have record of any of that. during this time. What we find is in great part missionary activity is taking place by everyday plain vanilla Christians one-on-one. That's how it was happening. No big missions organizations, no photocopy machines, no faxes, no computers, no laptops, no printing presses. One-on-one basically anonymous Christians telling another person about the Lord. And that's how it spread. So though we find evidence of Christianity and the Gospel being spread into other languages and other areas, no big names, no big name organization.

By the end of the 3rd century, and remember this is still around the year 300, was still a time of the Roman Empire persecuting Christians. Close to one in every ten people in the Roman Empire, by this time, is a believer. That's amazing. That's during a time, like I say, no photocopy machines, no faxes, not allowed to have a place like this, no signs out front, can't do that.

One person telling another person, one at a time, about the gospel. And these are the places we have record within the old Roman Empire of where there were churches at that time. Not church buildings necessarily, typically not, but churches, gatherings of Christians. Then we step into the imperial church period. There, one of the things we find, of course, Christianity is starting to change now, as we've talked at other times, And one of the things that's starting to happen is, we call it Christianity, but what was starting to be spread about this time is monasteries. Hey, let's become Christians and have a monastery.

That was the idea. So, for example, you talk about in March, St. Patrick's Day. Well, here was St. Patrick, who was not Irish, coming to the Irish. And so we see that taking place here. the next century, Columba going into Scotland. And so we start seeing these movements from one area to another. But a lot of it was spreading of monasteries, establishing of monasteries, not necessarily what we would think of just plain telling the gospel. So things were changing. And here's a key point.

Whatever was established as Christianity, that's what got spread through missionary activity. So real important, missionary activity is going to be no better than the quality of Christians and believers that are spreading it. If they have error in their teaching, if they've got some crazy ideas, that's what's going to be spread. So it really still puts the focus back, remember what Jesus said, teaching them, making disciples. and frequently it got distorted to making monasteries. Or, we'll talk about it later, making converts with a sword. We'll see that in a bit.

Other translations started to move in as well, and those got carried into additional geographical areas. The same list here, different underscorings. But you see some of these translations, If during this time we're getting into other translations, when you add up the different translations that were made that were hand-copied between the Greek and the Latin and the Aramaic and the different versions of the New Testament, that's where we end up with about 24,000 hand-copied manuscripts for the New Testament. Isn't that amazing? Massive number of copies, and that's not including lectionaries and commentaries that include the same text.

Okay. Now going into this next period, one of the things that happened, the church became more established in Rome as the focal point. Shortly after that period of time, an explosion took place in the Middle East. And we'll go into it next week as we'll cover the history of Islam and its interactions with Christianity. An explosion took place from here. Here's about 632 is actually when Muhammad died. Every direction. This just went off into India. Right now, we think of this as the center of Islam. Only about 20% of those who believe in Islam live in this area. The other 80% live in other parts of the world. Indonesia, Pakistan.

But it exploded from here, and why do I mention that in the context of missionaries? These people just kill them. If someone is a believer, what they said is, you know, are you going to convert? No. That's it. So basically it was like a hand hitting mercury just splattered all over the world at the time.

Within a century, and that's one of the things we point out here, by 732, 100 years after the death of Muhammad, the Muslim advance was finally turned back in tourist France. 100 years to the year from Muhammad's death and we're into central France, getting these guys back. They slaughtered everywhere they went, yes.

Yeah, their population of Muslims and a significant amount being Iraqi is around 10% now in France. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes. France now has more Muslims than Evangelical Christians. By multiples. Yeah, still exploding. Here's the other thing that's amazing. You will be told Islam is a religion of peace. Why this with the sword? Why the scimitar to so many heads? If that's the case. Okay.

Viking raids followed afterwards, so it isn't one agony, it's another. The Viking raids followed afterwards, and what the Vikings did, because they operated from ship, you see, they hit the shores. They went way far, look at these, way, way into other areas, and we think, boy, that's a long distance. They went quite a distance away from where they originally were, and we had these Viking raids along the coastlands. This also had an impact, on missionary activity because it ended up being something where you might be trying to get some missionary activity established and the Vikings came in.

They loved to raid churches and go in and kill all the churches and then they'd take anybody they didn't kill and sell them as slaves and take anything they felt was valuable. And so it kind of put a damper on any missionary activity along any coastline. Difficult. Real difficult. Tend to make people retreat inwards.

These Vikings did have a missionary to the Vikings. As a matter of fact, you may even run across some churches that will call them Saint Ansgar or Ansgar, differently pronounced. And also this last year you may see some different numbers. It's one of those things where historians argue over it. He would go in and try to establish kind of mission front with the Vikings. Largely unsuccessful. Real tough group to make some headway. It's difficult when they're burning and killing and that sort of thing. Not real welcoming of the message.

Now, another thing during this period of time, we mentioned this up in Ireland and Scotland. There were also moves from Rome up in this direction and then from Ireland and Scotland, Britain, basically back down to the mainland and then over into Scandinavia. And additionally, Constantinople into the middle part of Eastern Europe there. And notice from here, even into Russia.

One of the things I noticed is that if you were to draw these arrows It's all over the place. There is no consistent singular pattern. Sometimes waves of missionary activity. Some missionary activities just completely failed, others successful after a period of time.

One of the things we pointed out some time back here, there were two guys, Cyril and Methodius, that came from Thessalonica. that Paul wrote the letter to. They came there nearly a millennium later and went up here and basically developed Old Slavic which is the root language for Russian and Czech and a number of those languages. A lot of what had to be done in some of these European and Eastern European cultures is to give the people a written language because they didn't have one. And so the missionaries that would go in would develop a written language and teach the people how to read. And what they would teach, of course, is here's the scriptures. And that is what we find today among a lot of missionaries. They will go into areas where the people have a spoken language, but no written language. And so what has to be done is to develop a written language and teach the people that language. A real challenge. Especially when you don't have photocopy machines and computers. Quite a chore.

One of the other things you notice, see these additional translations. And I put this here because the exact date is not quite certain as to when it was translated. But additional translations in other languages. By the way, that English as we saw a couple months ago, you and I could hardly make any sense of it.

English has changed so much in the last thousand years that there's about, out of John 3.16, there's about three words that you can recognize. Sort of. Close. Okay? Something else real interesting.

There have been multiple contacts with China over the centuries. People frequently think of this as some place far away and recall stories of Marco Polo. Marco Polo's contact was a re-contact over a period of time. Antioch, you know where Paul was sent from? That church? that city was on the New Testament-era Silk Road. They had things coming from China, through Antioch, all the way to Rome, and back. So there was contact back in those days. Here's one instance during this period of time.

The Christian church building near Xi'an, China, dated 638. Three years before that, some monks from Persia, this was before Islam became established there, some monks from Persia had gone into China They claimed that there were at one point in time hundreds of Christian churches in China. This is evidence of just one of them just a few years after establishing a beachhead there. In 1289 some Franciscan friars, that's from St. Francis of Assisi, they began mission work in China.

In 1368, less than a hundred years later, the mission folds. One of the things that would happen is if they got some political leader that didn't care for what was being said, they would do them in. A couple centuries later, for example, a missionary movement was established in Japan.

And what did they do? They said, well, you're telling us about crucifixion? Let's do that to you. And that's what they did. They took the missionaries and crucified them all. So a lot of times a mission would be established and you'd have to re-establish it because they'd take the missionaries and do them in. Unwelcome message. Okay. How are we doing here? Holding up okay? Okay. Alright.

From 1570 to 1648, that's what we've been calling a Reformation period. And the same way that we've been talking about there were churches who, for example, aligned themselves with government and military entities and others that did not, whatever habits or practices they had in aligning themselves with government and military entities, they carried that over in their missionary activities. That was true, for example, of the Crusades. The same thing happened in this period of time. Hey, let's go ahead and send some soldiers over there and some missionaries too. So, unfortunately, the two got very confused. One of the things that would happen during this period of time is, for example, the Roman Catholic Church had a technique for converting the Jews.

It goes like this. You get all the Jews in town into the cathedral. You give them their ultimatum in Latin. They don't speak Latin, but they've been given it. Now, they have to convert to Christianity. Hopefully they understand that. And if they don't, they die. It's that simple.

So that was the means of evangelizing the Jews during this period of time. It's one of the reasons that a lot of Jews, when you talk about, well, I'm a Christian, it's... huge reaction, because that was one of the means of evangelism during that period of time. Frequently what would happen here, if we look at the Protestant Reformation in a sense as a missionary activity, because in one sense that's what it was, they were translating the Bible into people's language. And so what would happen is then people would have the Bible in their language for the first time that they could read it.

I mean, imagine the average person being able to read this thing. Whoa! How come we didn't get this before? So to be able to see this and read this, that was a missionary activity even though right in the midst of what you would say, okay, we've already got Christianity here, but it was a new discovery. So there was actually missionary activity going on in places where Christianity had supposedly been for centuries. Here's an example, the Tyndale New Testament, 1525. Here, Tyndale, he told a priest, he says, I'm going to have the New Testament, I'm paraphrasing, I'm going to have the New Testament so that the plowboy knows more than you.

Now, if you look at this map, several things to look at. One of the things that was real interesting during this period of time, the Dutch East Indies, basically business, they had a business going over to Malaysia, and what they did, and this is interesting because usually we talk about missionaries being associated sometimes with political or military, what they did is they associated with their business. So they had missionaries and they put missionaries on their ships. and then they'd take them over there and as long as that particular business organization continued they were able to support the missionaries right along the side. Put them on the ship along with the cargo and give them space in the office and whatever they needed and support it that way.

What typically tended to happen is Protestants tended to move towards this side of North America and the other side of North America and into South America tended to be more Catholic inroads. There were a few exceptions to that. The few exceptions didn't tend to do very well. But nonetheless, that was the general pattern. And that's one of the reasons, of course, we got Protestantism established in the colonies and along the East Coast. And that's something we could go into more later. But a huge impact just from that and it's impacted our country and ourselves even to this day. Moving into the period of time after the Reformation.

Here we are moving into the United States and one of the things we mentioned before, here's the first printed Bible in America was in the native Algonquian Indian language and used by John Eliot to evangelize the American Indians. He and Roger Williams set up a training seminary for missionaries to go to the Indians. This was printed in 1663 it was over a hundred years later before the first English Bible was printed in America. Isn't that amazing? So this was long before and it is interesting during this period of time to have just gotten established in New England and right from there to make it a high priority to get this printed in their language and this was an example by the way of one where the The Indians did not have a written language, so what did they do? They developed one, and then taught them how to read it, and printed up the Bibles for them. So this is a neat example of how that's taken place even here in America.

Sunday school. It was developed in the late 1700s. Basically what happened was this. A lot of the kids that were from poorer communities worked in factories all day, Monday through Saturday. Their only day off was Sunday. So, here's all these kids with really very little in the way of family background and resources, and they just let them loose. And on Sunday, the kids would just terrorize the cities.

So, Robert Rakes came up and he said, I'll tell you what, let's make a missionary activity out of this. So he said, we're going to have Sunday schools, and he hired teachers, and he hired the teachers to first teach the kids to read, because these were kids that were poor and worked in the factories, they didn't know how to read. So we'll teach them how to read, and we'll tell them Bible stories. And he started doing that, and every town council, one after another, said, hooray, this is great, because now we're not spending every Sunday chasing these hooligan kids around. And not only that, we're seeing these kids, they're shaping up. This is making a difference in their lives. That's the start of Sunday School. It was for the poor unchurched.

It's taken on a very different form now, hasn't it? Amazing how the change has taken place. It was by about the time of the Civil War that it began to take on a different form in the U.S. where it was more something for those of the church and everyone had their kids go to Sunday school. A real different pattern from how it started. There are some missionary societies and missions that were formed during this period of time. It kind of dawned on a lot of people that, hey, we have these people in different parts of the world.

India, China, boy, there are so many of them that need to hear the gospel. One of them I mentioned here, James Hudson Taylor. One of the Chinese men talked to him and he says, why did you wait so long to tell me? How come you waited all this time to tell me? So the Chinese fellow that became a believer was elated to get the news. So in spite of centuries of waves of missionary activity, it needed to be replenished and continued.

Orphanages. George says there, I don't have the umlauts, I guess Mueller is probably the better pronunciation. He began founding orphanages in Britain. He did not ever, so I understand, let anybody know what the needs were. He only told the Lord. He continued to do that, only letting the Lord know what the needs were. And doing it only that way, He ended up providing housing for 2,100 orphans in five large homes. And not just the housing, but all the daily needs, including the clothing and the food and everything else they needed for those orphans, all by only telling the Lord about it. Only.

Some of the stories that went on is, they were at one point in time, they were about to serve the meal, and they had the kids down at the meal, and they had nothing to eat. And so they began praying, and as soon as an amen was said, a knock at the door. Apparently there had been some excess at the bakery. And in came the meal, ample for the needs of the kids. No advertised need, only the Lord.

Here's another one missionary to Africa David Livingston. This is the one you ever hear the phrase Livingston I presume dr. Livingston I presume okay, what happened is is about 1870 he had been out and Basically, they sent out search party for him a kind of a rescue party and when the leader of the rescue Encountered him. That's the words that he spoke. Dr. Livingston.

I presume okay, so He basically had set his sights on going to Asia, but somehow, I think it was China where he was headed, the Opium War started and it was just a bad time for missionaries to go, so he ended up spending his career in Africa. He not only was a missionary, but also brought in medical help, he was a doctor, and spent a lot of time exploring as well. He combined that because so much of the center heart of Africa, was unknown. And so people, in being more aware of what's there, who's there, could have an idea, here's how you get to these places, and here are the people that are there that the missionaries need to go to.

So exploration was helpful in the mission field. Some of the things that have happened in our own time, and in times just before ours here, there has either been an application of technology that wasn't there before, or combined with that, missions of special need, meeting special needs. And I just have a couple examples here.

Wycliffe Bible Translators was one that came in. Here's a fellow who's of the Indian tribe in Central America. One of the Indians says, if your God is so great, why doesn't he speak my language? And so his response is to found Wycliffe Bible Translators. And they have a a pretty massive organization, which is necessary. And now they're using computers for the translating process and a lot of the communications. Yeah, Tom? Yeah, good question. I don't know. Yeah, I have not the foggiest idea on that one. I haven't asked him. Yeah, don't know. You can check into that if you want. I really have no idea.

Later to become Missionary Aviation Fellowship, the Christian Airmen's Missionary Fellowship was launched in 1945. Basically it had started a few years earlier. There was a Bible study of three American fighter pilots, fighter and other aviation service pilots.

And from that developed MAF, it's called, where they support about 200 missions organizations that don't have their own flight abilities. Some of them do, for example, New Tribes does have its own flying capacity inside the organization. A number of them don't, and so MAF serves and supports a lot of those organizations.

That'd be examples. There's lots of others we could point to. There's a lot of medical missions and things like that. But the new technologies kind of brought on a need to be able to concentrate the expertise and the equipment and support for all those kinds of things. Some of the present challenges. And boy, some of the stuff you look at, boy, it's a real head-scratcher.

There are unreached people groups throughout the world totaling 2 billion people with 60% of those being in places where missionaries legally cannot go. Almost two-thirds. You might want to send a missionary there, but the country doesn't allow it. I'd say, you're a missionary? We don't allow missionaries. Bang. That's it. Not permitted. Disapproved. You can't get in. Some of them will get in.

I know one fellow, for example, he goes into Turkey to teach English as a second language. And then he has that as his capacity as a teacher. And so he's able to go into Turkey that way, but not permitted if he just says, I'm a missionary. So you have that.

Of all the funds spent by Christian organizations, about 0.5% goes towards missions to those unreached people groups. Here you have this massive number of people, about 2 billion, who haven't heard the gospel. And so here's all the money spent by Christian organizations. It's actually a couple hundred billion dollars. That all boils down to this less than 1% being spent to reach these people who have never heard.

And finally here, Islam, the fastest growing world religion, has a no-tolerance policy for Christians and anyone converting from Islam to Christianity. Officially, and we'll see this next week, officially, under Islam, if you are Islamic and convert to Christianity, death sentence. Death sentence. You're done. No questions asked, you're done.

There's no tolerance policy for Christianity. You may not take a Christian Bible into Saudi Arabia and a number of other Islamic countries. You simply may not take it. One fellow said he tried to take one in and they just took it directly from the suitcase, dropped it in the shredder. It's gone. Didn't ask him about it, didn't say you can pick it up on your way out. Just, it's gone. You try to bring it in here.

The Saudi Arabian government has not only their civil police, they have religious police. And so if you're out walking around, for example, during the established prayer time, they take you in and arrest you. So there's a no-tolerance policy. How do you carry on missionary activities in the middle of that? It's tough, isn't it?

Okay, next week we'll be looking at the origins and history of Islam. It has been something even though it didn't come about until about six centuries after the New Testament. It has ended up having a huge impact on Christianity. Now it has a huge impact on missions activities. we're obviously seeing is having a huge impact on our own country. What there has tended to be is a pendulum swing.

Islam did its first sweep within the hundred years after Islam was started, where it swept into Asia and swept into North Africa and into Europe. Then it was beaten back. That's the Crusades. Then it swept out again around the 1400s. Then it was beaten back, and so there's this pendulum swing What's happening now is the pendulum swing is swinging back towards Islam.

They're the fastest growing world religion in the world. They're establishing their power through their oil. And obviously seeing the impact in this country. Yes? That's a good point. We'll be looking at that in more detail this next Sunday. But if you think about it, first of all, Christianity, we say our kingdom really isn't here. Ultimately, our citizenship is elsewhere, it's in heaven. Islam defines everything. Not just religion, it defines how the government works, it defines how you operate. Everything in life is defined by Islam.

It has a no-tolerance policy, whereas Christianity... I mean, we don't say... There are 7 million Muslims here in the United States. We don't say, kill them all. We don't say, you can't have your Koran, you can't have your church. You can't have a church over in Saudi Arabia, but you can have mosques here wherever you can build them. So, it's not so much that there's a drawing card, as much as it has a one-way valve.

If you become a Christian, you're dead. That's the rule in their country. You come here, you want to be Islamic? Fine. So it tends to work itself one way, the way they operate and the way they live and the way the rules go. We'll take a look at that more. England is now being overtaken, for example, more by mosques. Christianity is losing out in terms of numbers count. We'll see next week. A poll was taken just a few years ago.

They asked the Muslims, would you fight for England? Almost 100%. Almost 100% said, no, I'm not going to fight for England. About half of those people who were polled said that they felt like Osama bin Laden was a freedom fighter. those are now growing in numbers and throughout Europe and England is just case in point.

So amazing, yeah, I mean it's phenomenal. The pendulum swing is coming back towards Islam after these centuries of back and forth and we're kind of doing some battling back here in the last couple of years but they're very fixed on this and their goal is It's clear. You're either Islamic or you're dead. What we're doing here this morning, it would not be tolerated. We would all be in jail or worse. If we were in an Islamic country. Yeah. We were told that many of the mosques are built on ruins of Christian churches. Yes.

What's really strange, we'll take a look at it next week. We're doing time-wise. The Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock is built over a rock that is supposedly the rock where Abraham offered up, not Isaac, but Ishmael. But what's very interesting, that dome, unlike all the other mosques, that dome has no direction that it's pointed to. That's one point. We'll see why next week. Something else very interesting.

There are niches in the rock, and we'll see the picture, there are niches in the rock that fit the size description of the Ark of the Covenant, for which they have no good explanation. But the Moslem view is that there never was a temple on that site. That's their view, official view.

Yeah, Norm? In the Emirates? Yeah? Right. Right. Right. And we had a great feeling towards America, and a great feeling towards our motherland, and we wanted to stand together and be willing to do that at that time. However, I feel that once the American economy is going where we want to, we're going to have to make the switch, you got it? Yeah. And there's a number one export environment in Iran. Yeah. So it only goes over to the United States.

Yeah, and one of the things is Islam is opportunistic. Muhammad had made a 10 year peace treaty with the leaders of Mecca, according to the records anyway. Basically he was militarily unable to take them on. Two years into that treaty he broke it and attacked them and slaughtered because he then had the ability to take them on. So it's very opportunistic, and it's even written into the code.

Yes, redheads and blondes, I understand. Anyway, we'll get into the subject of Islam. Next week, there will be a full set of handouts on it. It's going to be quite a bit to cover. I think you'll find it fascinating. There are some things in there that, as I've looked into it, complete surprises. Things that are like, you're kidding. So anyway, I think you'll find it interesting.

Let's pray. Lord, as we look over the centuries and see these missionary activities, boy, it sure falls far short of what we would long to see and like to see, and yet we know that You are not willing that any should perish. We look to Your faithfulness. We look to Your sovereignty and Your love for the world. Your willingness to give Your Son over to death for our behalf. Lord, what a marvelous thing. We thank You for that. In Jesus' name, Amen.