What Happened after the NT era

Okay, we've looked in the Book of Acts here, and then subsequent to that, the life of John. And by the way, this isn't to imply that John didn't live until 62 AD, but the idea is that was the time when John hung around a lot of the other apostles that either died or gone to even other continents. Okay. And so here's John went home to be with the Lord, the only apostle we know of that died a natural death in about 96 AD. And remember when we looked at this event in 70 AD where Rome defeated Jerusalem? That was a huge change. We want to take a look at some of those changes. Think of what it would have been like for the Jews.

Here, even if the Jews didn't live in Israel, that Temple activity was the center of everything, wasn't it? If you lived hundreds of miles away, you would travel to Jerusalem to come to the temple. That's what we see revealed in Acts chapter 2 in the day of Pentecost. You had people from all over different parts of the world, actually into three different continents, converging on Jerusalem. Why?

Because it was the temple there, and the temple activity, and that was central. Let's take a look at this. the spread of Christianity by about the time of the death of John, and we saw the change from Jerusalem to Rome. As we see the book of Acts begin, the church is starting in Jerusalem, and that's where it grows. But by the end of the first century, by the time of John, the church in Rome was the largest church, and the church in Jerusalem had all been but kicked out. Now, this defeat of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Romans went in and they destroyed Jerusalem's defenses, ripped down a lot of gates, portions of the wall, tore up the temple completely, disassembled it, didn't just kind of knock it around or bust it up.

Every single block of it was dumped off the edge. And that's what archaeologists found when they went to dig it up. Piles of rubble. pieces of the temple that they just took apart piece by piece and dumped off the edge. Many Jews and Jewish Christians were scattered outside Israel. About a million Jews lived in Israel. The vast majority of them were shoved outside. They were told by the Romans, you're not living here anymore. Those that survived. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died in that attack. but those that survived shoved out of Israel.

The Jews from other lands who used to contribute to the temple regularly no longer did so because there wasn't any temple to contribute to. None. Zip. And they didn't visit Jerusalem at regular intervals like they had been accustomed to. That didn't happen. The party of the Sadducees, that's kind of the minority party that we read about in the New Testament, gone. Completely disappeared. We talked earlier about there were two legal courts in Israel, the court of Shammai and Hillel. The court of Shammai completely wiped out. So major things that were part of the social and legal system and the religious system in Israel cut off.

The practice of placing one's family members' bones in ossuary boxes a year after their burial ended. This is Caiaphas' ossuary box. They would bury the body as you see described with Jesus. A year later, they would just unwrap the cloth, take the bones, and put them in basically a limestone box.

That practice ended. One of the places where they would typically put the bones is on the Mount of Olives, across from the temple. Well, everything, the temple was gone, everything all ripped up. The Romans had occupied outside Jerusalem for quite a while, and some people didn't do that anymore. The practice stopped. Temple-based laws were reinterpreted.

What do you do? Here you want to follow the law down to the last letter. What do you do when you can't? It says, go to the temple and have the priest do this. Go to the temple and have the priest do that. What do you do when there isn't a temple and there isn't a priest? And you don't know who's a priest anymore.

They came up with things like this. Fasting is a sacrifice. So you fast instead of doing that one. See? So now, here they have all these laws and they can't follow a lot of them, so they come up with substitutes. Any real basis for it? No. But it's the best they could figure to do.

Polygamy, which had been practiced only by a few wealthy Jews, now becomes even more rare. Almost unheard of. Polygamy was illegal and as immoral as the Romans and the Greeks were, it was reprehensible to them to have more than one wife, besides being illegal except for a Jewish special exemption. But it became even more rare. Why? Now you have the Jews just totally scattered, none of them in a place of their own, and so the practice would be even less acceptable.

I show the Herod family tomb because Herod was a polygamist. I think a total of 10 wives. He put them all together. He didn't allow all of them to live, but he had 10. Okay. Here's the model of the temple. You've got the administrative and priestly offices. They had genealogical records.

That's why you see in the Gospels where it shows the record of the genealogy of Joseph and Mary. And those kind of records and anybody doubted that Jesus is descended from David they could go in the temple and check it out until 70 AD the Romans went in and they tore everything apart all those offices there was not one Stone left on another not one stone left on top of the temple mount all the records burnt every last one No more Since the Jews' temple in the city of their heart's home was destroyed, and you can read numerous places in the Old Testament, this reference in Psalm 137, 5 and 6 is one of them. It was the heart's home for the Jew. The Jews thought, if I forget everything else, let me remember Jerusalem. That's my heart's home.

Now it's gone. Now you're told you can't live there. Now any record that you even lived there is now erased. You had a home here, it's gone now. Leave. Where? It's up to you. But you're not here. So you imagine the Jewish mindset in the middle of this. This was a hugely disruptive time for them.

Here's rubble from the temple. By the way, the rubble up in the front portion of this picture has already been cleaned up, but you can see where they dumped and it caused a kind of a collapse on the ground. They dumped the huge stones off, and they've cleaned up some of it, but some of the rubble was still left off in the end there. But when they first went along this wall, just mounds and mounds of rubble from the old temple. So here's, by the end of the New Testament era, here the ink is drying, and I use that figuratively on the book of Revelation.

By then, Things were starting to change and the church was starting to drift from what the Apostles had laid down Here's one of the ways Clement Called himself the bishop of the church at Rome The Roman Catholic Church lists him as one of the Popes, but that wasn't a title that they used And he wrote a letter to the church of Corinth about the same year as John Went home to be with the Lord right after writing Revelation. I And he starts telling him what to do. How far away is Corinth from Rome? Hundreds of miles away.

He has no authority to do that. He has absolutely no biblical authority to do that, but that's what he did. He started acting as if he had the authority. No foundation for it whatsoever. Ignatius, shortly after that, He's called the bishop of the church at Antioch. He writes to Smyrna, hundreds of miles away, again, taking authority he had no biblical basis for, and starts ordering around. Do this, don't do that. One of the things that he said, it's not permitted to baptize or hold a love feast apart from the bishop. If the bishop isn't there, you can't do it.

Now you start to see people abusing authority and lording it over. Now, just let that grow uncontrolled, and what does that turn into? It turns into the church of several centuries later, where all of a sudden you've got the bishop ordering things done. And by the time the Roman Empire is starting to go into decline, these bishops and the Pope in Rome is now calling the shots, crowning kings, ordering people killed.

413 AD, it was decided, if you don't baptize your little children, you're killed, and we'll baptize them anyway. Death penalty for failing to baptize your children, just a few centuries later. Biblical basis for that? Absolutely none. How would you like that, parents? You don't baptize your baby? We're gonna kill both of you, and then baptize them anyway, and somebody else will raise them.

Nice choice, huh? Nice, graceful, loving choice. So here's Clement and Ignatius, reaching far beyond their biblical authority, just as John, the last apostle, is going home to be with the Lord. Here was the concept that they had, They started going on with this idea of apostolic succession, and both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church has claimed this. It's funny how they both claim it. I don't know how they can get there, but apostolic succession. Here's Christ.

He gave the apostles. The apostles, according to the, I'll call it mythology, then appointed certain people, and that lineage is then what gives them authority. But what we see in Scripture is, initially, There was plurality of eldership in each church. That was what the apostles established.

Chapter 14, Paul and Barnabas are going around. First missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas loop back and appoint elders in each church. And when we get to the time after the apostles, now we're starting to see these bishops in places that are around the Mediterranean, starting to gain control. One of them is there in Antioch, the first place where people were called Christians.

I'm writing to a fellow right now who is in an Antiochian Orthodox monastery in Arizona, and he's trying to get out. He's about my age. It so happens that he and I had some common friends and whatnot in contacts in a church in Palo Alto about 30 years ago, Palo Alto, California. And he somehow ended up in this, you know, Orthodox Church, and he's trying to get out.

It's one of the bishops from centuries back that kind of founded a separate Orthodox Church and had this apostolic succession idea. And it's interesting to talk to them and see, this is just what they carried on. But look what happens. The question is, who's really the boss? The authority was increasingly assumed by these centralized powers.

Now there are 20, maybe one or two more, I think at least 20 Orthodox churches, plus the Roman Catholic Church. And by the way, the Roman Catholic Church claims to be one single church. I got a list at home. Dozens of Roman Catholic Churches. Dozens. So it's not a single big group. There's a number of them that don't claim authority under the existing Pope of Rome.

But what they did was increasingly put these early Church Fathers as a parallel authority to the Scripture. So now when you have a choice to make, what do you pick as your choice? You picked the early church fathers. So now, rather than contend for the faith that was once for all given to the saints, it was a growing tendency to take the words of these authorities as equal to or above scripture, and even telling you, you are not allowed to interpret scripture on your own.

You cannot understand it. We will tell you what it means. It's interesting, that's the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, by the way. You are not allowed to interpret scripture on your own. We will tell you what it means, and what we say it means is what it means. Now, does scripture teach apostolic succession or doctrinal succession? Here's what it comes to.

2 Timothy 1.14. By the way, 2 Timothy is Paul's last letter that we have possession of. It is written, I mean, at the very last chapter of 2 Timothy, he's saying, my life is poured out. I've run the race.

He realizes he's close to done. So he's passing on critical, critical messages to Timothy. And he says, guard through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you. What does he mean by that entrusted? Let's take a look. Some verses later, The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

You don't see apostolic succession, you see doctrinal succession. Carry on the doctrine that has been taught from one to the next to the next. The claim to apostolic succession has no biblical authority. It's doctrinal succession that counts. Doctrinal succession.

Colossians 123 we looked at. What was the reference there? The gospel that you have heard. From whom? From me, Paul the Apostle. That was the authority, the teaching that was passed on. 2 Peter has a similar message. You continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard. It's assumed to be true here in the Greek, as I pointed out last week here.

This you have heard, Ephesians 4.21. You have heard him and have been taught in him. Okay? 2 Timothy again. Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me. The succession is teaching, not here. Here's the baton, now you've got the authority. Do what you want.

Unfortunately, the apostolic succession thing It is a serious error, and it cost the lives of a great many people. Under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, over 60 million people were killed under orders of the Roman Catholic Church from the year 1100 to the year 1800. Killed them. There were some heretics in one town in France. They went to the Catholic abbot and asked them, how do we know which ones are heretics? The abbot said, kill them all. Every last one.

God knows who those were his. He had that authority because he took the authority upon him when the mandate from the Apostle Paul was continue not the authority of man but the authority of scripture. Key difference. And it meant the lives of millions and millions of people. Which you have been following is a perfect tense verb. You have been following and you've gotten it and it's complete.

That's the message that he has there in 1 Timothy 4.6. Constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine that you have been following.

There's New Testament references to the faith. You have a copy of this in your handout here, in the back of the section. These references to the faith are references to a specific set of doctrines and teachings, not just, you know, believing something. Not just, hey, we're all Christians, right? A specific set of doctrines.

That's why Jude could write, I urge you to contend earnestly, and is earnestly contend. There the Greek means, he used a word that means an Olympic athletic effort. I urge you to have an Olympic athletic effort for the faith, definite article, that was once for all delivered to the saints, hap hax, once given perpetually valid. How about that?

The Roman Catholic Church, and there's a similar history for the Orthodox Church, varying in some ways, accumulated doctrines over time. What you'll see here is attendance at Mass is made mandatory 1000 AD. About that centuries passed before they said, hey, you have to come to Mass. Or to have the Rosary, about a hundred years after that almost. Transubstantiation, the idea that you eat this wafer and there is the blood and body of Christ in this little wafer. Over a thousand years after the time of the New Testament.

Oh, we forgot to tell you something Then finally in 1545 Tradition is equal to the authority of the scripture They never had to bring it up before you know why because nobody was allowed to have the scripture so it didn't matter It was capital punishment if you had a Bible in your own language John Wycliffe in England Translated the Latin version of the Bible into English and that was the Wycliffe translation and When he died and amazingly he died a natural death when he died the Pope ordered that his bones be dug up burned to ashes and thrown into the river and And that was just because they despised that he had placed the Bible in a language that people could understand. Baptism, baptizing infants, was not considered an acceptable practice in the church until about 220 AD, over a century passed after John died, before that was considered to be an allowable practice. By a couple centuries after that, it was a mandatory practice death penalty if you don't.

That's what I mentioned earlier. Same thing, let me skip on that one. Same thing also, about 220, they developed a program where if you came to church, you were allowed to stay for certain portions of the church service, and then if you hadn't been there for three years, you were told to leave. And then after you'd been there for three years and were allowed to come into all the sessions, in order to do that, you had to finalize it after three years and then get baptized.

So that progressed after the time of the apostles, but that was what tradition added to the picture. It's been changed a little bit more since, but nonetheless, that was the pattern. The Lord's Table, as we'll be doing this morning in our main service, was one that was taken initially as we see it now. It is a picture of the reality. It is a remembrance. That's what we see the Lord saying in the Gospel of Luke. That's what Paul records in 1 Corinthians 11. It's a remembrance.

But by the year 220, again, here's the threshold. They're saying, okay, no, this is actually, the Lord is present in these things. And now it gets to be, it makes you holier as you take this into you. You see the teaching begin to creep in all about the same time. Here's this fellow here who says he uses the term priest for bishop.

Oh boy. Now we see it changing. Okay. He uses the altar for the place of the celebration and the sacrifice for the observance. So now you see everything slipping into what you see the modern teaching. Did the apostles teach that? Nope. Apostles didn't teach it, but a century and a half after John's gone home to be with the Lord, then it's brought up, and then it's taught as the truth. Strange, huh?

One of the things that happened, and I think you have a handout, full page, that covers this. We divide it between the top and the bottom. The top, we have literal interpretation of Scripture, which we see carried on in the churches in Syria and Asia Minor, and among the Jews. for a few centuries, eventually became to be very much the minority. We see some evidence of it during the Middle Ages, basically when the Catholic Church took control.

They said that if you understand scripture literally, that's immature. Instead, you have to interpret it allegorically. You can't take that stuff seriously. The allegorical interpretation was actually brought about by the Greek skeptics. They didn't believe their own myths, and so they were skeptical of it, and they said, well, they're really allegories. That was carried over by those Christians who were who were living after the apostles into the church It was based on Greek skepticism And now you find the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches following that a lot of the reform Presbyterian Lutheran Anglican and Methodist churches follow that same interpretive method in some degree they force an allegory on the on the account What do I mean by allegory?

They would say, for example, that Job had seven sons, and that represents the twelve apostles. What connection you make to that? But that's what it is. In Revelation chapter 7, it says there are twelve tribes. Remember the 144,000? And there's 12,000 from each tribe, and it lists the tribes, the allegorical interpretation, and I have a copy of a Coptic Orthodox commentary on Revelation. The interpretation among these groups who take the allegorical approach is that that represents the denominations of Christianity, even though you name each tribe by name.

So, bizarre, but that's the way they approach it. But that allegorical interpretation comes from the Greek pagan philosophers who were skeptical. They didn't believe, so it's an interpretation method of disbelief that controls the understanding. Clement of Alexandria, one of these Christians who started bringing in this idea of allegorizing, said that the scripture is inspired and the Greek philosophers are inspired too.

So that's why when you get into the Middle Ages, they would start seminaries and monastery schools and they taught people not only Scriptures, but they also taught them Greek philosophy because you got to mix the two they're both inspired Okay What we see happening here is what we want to avoid Okay, when we look at Bible backgrounds, we want to understand what does the scripture say originally?

What did it mean when Paul wrote what he wrote? What did it mean when John wrote what he wrote? What did it mean when Peter wrote what he wrote? not Now that some time has gone by what does it mean to us? Initially yes, we want to apply it to our lives We want to apply it to our heart, but we don't want to forget what it originally meant It was that faith once delivered to the Saints that Jude urges us to contend for What happened is they put the church fathers in the same authority as scripture there was a cultural evolution towards spiritually effective rituals and About 220 A.D. is kind of the threshold where that came into play. And those rituals affected the church. They came about through failing to understand the true history and culture of the Old and New Testament. So they displaced the real meaning and put in their own.

So the bottom line is, God's design for the continuity of the church is not in passing the baton and saying, here, you've got the authority now. One of the things that Peter wrote to the elders in 1 Peter 5, 1 through 4, says, do not lord it over the flock. I think it's lording it over the flock when you tell people, go and kill all those people in the name of the Lord. Then the position in life of Christ is then smothered by this authority structure that's set up.

When we look at scripture, the line of continuity needs to be the objective truth, not a string of people to put in place. Things can get terribly degraded with a string of people, can't they? Because they have no accountability other than to themselves. By the time of Luther, it was said of the Pope, it's better to be a whore in Rome than a little boy. It was that sad. We want to make sure we understand what the original scriptures said, and not just simply depend on what somebody else said. And that's one reason why I say from time to time, don't believe anything I tell you. Check it out for yourself.

God has revealed his word. The continuity is not through a line of people, but a line of truth that doesn't change. Rather than being influenced by the culture, and by the way that's the world, so as to have the culture determine what's happening in the church, we need instead to have what God intended And it's the work of the Holy Spirit who will lead us into the truth of the word. He will focus our attention upon Christ and his life. The one with whom we're now seated. Okay, next time we're going to be looking at pre-flood culture. It's real interesting. There is very little to go on except what we have in scripture. Because the flood wiped out almost everything. Very little else.

So we'll be taking a look at that. We'll be breaking out of this history aspect of things and looking instead at what are the cultures. And we'll be looking at cultures of different times and places. Focusing on the culture and not so much the history as we've been doing here for weeks. We need to understand both, but although we'll talk some about history, the majority of the focus will be on the culture. pre-flood and patriarchal cultures next, and Egyptian culture, and then Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and other biblical cultures. A lot of people might not recognize, but there are other biblical cultures that are indicated in Scripture.

John, for example, in the book of Revelation, says that Jesus has a sword out of his mouth. He doesn't use the word for the Roman short sword, about a two foot long Roman sword. He uses the barbarian sword, a five foot long sword that the barbarians swung with two hands. Interesting.

How about references to Scythians? That was the one we said the Scythians fought the Jews in the second century BC with drunken elephants. So different cultures outside of those that are immediately listed in scripture. After that, we'll go into some studies about how they lived in the families, what the family life was like, religion and politics, slavery, which is a real common picture in both the Old and New Testament, work, what was that like, some phrases, and then finally the Seven Churches of Revelation. All right, I've gone on and on. Questions, discussions, exasperations? Yes. Okay. The word orthodox is used in two ways, so you need to discern which one it is. First of all, the word orthodox is typically Ortho means straight, okay?

And the dox means the teaching. So straight teaching is technically what it means. So it's used in the sense of this is standard biblical teaching. So it's used in the sense of evangelical teaching. So if somebody comes up with a doctrine that seems out of whack, you might say, well that's not orthodox. And we don't mean orthodox in the sense of Russian orthodox, Greek orthodox, Serbian orthodox. We just mean this is straight teaching.

Now, the second usage of the word Orthodox, though, is those that are like my friend in the Antiochian Orthodox Church. There's the Antiochian, there's the Coptic Orthodox, there's the Serbian, there's the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox, Assyrian Orthodox. So there's about 20 different Orthodox, it's like 20 plus Orthodox churches in that sense. And the way it happened is this. There was no separate Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church or Protestant churches or anything like that. The church was basically one group with some false teachers that were starting to stray things.

In the year 284, the Roman Empire split administratively because it was so stretched out. that they found it tough to keep control, so they actually split the administration of the Roman Empire. They called it one empire, but split it into two separate groups. By 395 AD, the empire actually did split. So it wasn't just an administrative convenience. It was a, we got the East and we got the West, and you know, they're that way. As the empire continued to degrade, each of the churches rose in power.

The church took up the vacuum both in the east and in the west that was left by the degrading Roman Empire So what happened is is towards the the latter part of that disintegration You find the Roman Catholic Church starting to emerge separate from the Orthodox churches plural, okay and By 1054 AD, the conflict between the two churches had got so intense that one of the orthodox patriarchs excommunicated the pope, and the pope excommunicated the orthodox patriarch. And so the battle was big. So anyway, that's a long answer, maybe, to your question. But does that answer your question? I get the idea across? Yeah. Basically, it was a... Yeah, but the reality is that the apostles never did found apostolic succession.

Like we see in those verses again and again, all the references to the faith, you've got them there. You know, what you've heard, what you've heard. Paul's last, you know, three letters to guys who was leaving behind are 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus. Fifty times in those three short letters he says, doctrine, teaching, instruction, what you've heard. The message and the content of the message was what he pounded with those last three letters to the guys that he was handing things off to. But he didn't call them apostles. He didn't call them bishops. He just said, you know, you're my delegates here and you guard. He didn't say guard your position. He said guard the truth. So it's amazing.

The word the word orthodox, you know, has developed a meaning of its own. But even then, it split up, the Roman Catholic Church split up, and the Roman Catholic Church doesn't typically acknowledge it, but it itself has dozens of different groups that have broken off from it. Yeah, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches teach a similar kind of transubstantiation, where when you take this wafer into your body, you are taking into you the body and the blood of Christ. It is called, I was reading the Catechism just last night because I had somebody asking a question about it. I read the Roman Catholic Catechism regularly.

And it says, here's a sacrifice. This is a sacrifice. Contrary to Hebrews 10.10 which says that Christ was sacrificed once for all. Once given perpetually valid. And the idea is in the context never to be sacrificed again. And yet what happens is every time they give the Mass it's another sacrifice. Except it's bloodless. But what does Hebrews also say? Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins. So it's a groundless practice to consider this to hold the body and blood of Christ. Absolutely foreign to scripture. But it was developed not as a matter of scripture, not as a matter of spirituality, but by adaptation of pagan rituals.

The practice that got carried on in the Roman Catholic Church, where you You can pay some money indulgences, you can pay some money and it helps get somebody less time in purgatory and things like that. That was brought in from Egyptian religion. That Mary is venerated was brought in from the Artemis religion at Ephesus. And it was in Ephesus where they had the council where they decided, now we can venerate Mary. It was to allow people to transfer their pagan practice of worshipping Artemis to now worshipping Mary.

They won't use the word worship, they'll say venerate, but it means the same thing. It is cultural adaptation. Okay, we've got these people here and they're worshipping Artemis, we've got to tell them not to do that anymore, so let's just let them worship Mary. And the pictures all look the same. Artemis was a virgin, by the way. And Artemis had this little baby child. So what are all the pictures of? Constant pictures of the baby child being held by the great mother.

So that's the practice. And the Orthodox churches went the same path. They divided later over other largely political issues. Politics determined the division. not what's the teaching of the apostles. Okay? I probably over-answered your question, but at least got the point across. Other thoughts, questions? Jubilations? Desperations? Yeah. Yes. Right. Right. They actually could have access to it. Obviously a lot of things were hand copied, but we think that's a laborious job because we have this ability to print and now I'll send you email. I'll send you the whole Bible via email.

But nonetheless, scripture was commonly available. And people could still read it in their own languages. Even shortly after the New Testament was completed, it was being translated into other languages, a great many other languages, taken very far afield. We mentioned previously, it appears in the first century of the gospel reached China, India, down into the northern parts of Africa. Some evidence it may have reached as far as England or Britain. By the end of the first century, and of course all those required language translation to be carried over very far, it was not as commonly available as we have it now, but still very commonly available.

It was only when it got to the point where they began making laws against people having the Bible in their own language, where it began to be more difficult, much more difficult, because they would destroy Any scriptures that they found and then give capital punishment to those who had them or translated them So it just you know, you got a Bible in your own language.

You're dead. And so is the scripture that we find The the church would hire We would call today private eyes guys whose job was to often find these things and destroy them one one group in the Middle Ages we heard about called the Alpagenses. We have only very secondary reference to them. There were tens of thousands of them, but they were slaughtered. And everything that they had was destroyed down to ashes everywhere it was found. So the references that we have about them are only secondary. That was a common practice. They hired people to hunt these people down and they gave them bounties.

You find this one or that one, tell me how many you killed, we'll pay you. And we just want to make sure you're thorough about it. Wipe out every last one. Tyndale's translation, okay? 18,000 in print. We have one whole copy now that we know of out of 18,000. They were very thorough in getting rid of it. Yeah, Dave? Albigensis. Yeah. It was in France. Yeah.

Muhammad died about 632 AD. He had come into a situation where there were hundreds of pagan religions of different kinds that were in the area in Arabia. He picked one, basically the moon god, that's why you see the moon, the crescent. He picked one, the moon god, and that's what he centered things around. that he called Allah. And he wrote the Quran and also the Hadith.

And anyway, 632 he died and Islam went to all three continents. It's interesting, in the first century of Christianity, the gospel message went peaceably to all the continents. in the Eastern Hemisphere. In the first hundred years of Islam, the sword went to all the continents.

A hundred years after Muhammad's death, the Islamic invasion of Europe finally was turned around at Tours, France. Martel was the guy who headed up the European reversion, if you will, the refusal of Islam and turned it back and pushed it back. So anyway, that was about 632 when Muhammad died and it's been a kind of a pendulum swing. The pendulum swing was first Islamic in this first century afterwards. Then the Crusades, about 1100 to 1300, things swung back against the Muslims. By 1400 it had gone back the other way. and then Islam got pushed back again and now in our lifetime we're seeing the pendulum swinging with Islam coming back the other way. They will not stop, the radical Islamists, they will not stop until everyone is either converted or dead. And that's their religion. By the way, what they're doing is they're just interpreting the Quran literally. They're doing what Muhammad did.

Mohammed made a peace agreement with the leaders of Mecca for 10 years. He says there's a 10-year peace agreement. Why did he do that? He didn't have the power to fight them. Two years later, after the agreement was, you know, written down, he signed an agreement. Yes, I agree to this. Two years later, he got up enough power and went and wiped them out. Broke the agreement. Why? It doesn't matter. It's all that counts, not the truth. Yeah, no, what you have is Ishmael, of course, out of Abraham's relationship there with Sarah's handmaiden. So then you've got Ishmael.

And from that descendancy, you've got the tribes of Ishmael. Now, you've also got other Arabic tribes that are under, for example, Esau. Jordan is now the descendants of the daughters of Lot, because remember they had an incestuous relationship with their daughters. So Jordan is now Ammon and Moab. The daughters of Lot had sons, and then to the south of that is the descendants of Esau, brother of Jacob. So that's Jordan. You've also got other relatives farther down into what was the area of Midian. So you've got other relatives, but basically You can look at the whole Middle East and get the picture out of reading the book of Genesis. You get the whole thing.

And that's what our government leaders today do not understand. If they read the book of Genesis and took it seriously, they'd understand what's happening there much better. And the problem is, we have a very short time frame. We just want to know what the next president's going to do. The people who... study the Koran and are wanting us dead, are doing so knowing the centuries of history. Knowing the centuries of history. Most of our culture doesn't.

Amazing, huh? Yeah. They need to read the book of Genesis. We get the people in Washington, D.C. to read the book of Genesis, they'll be a lot better off. Or it says that Ishmael will be a donkey of a man. Yeah. That's putting it lightly. Yeah. Other questions? We're about to run out of time here, but I don't want to leave questions deep. Oh, last one on page four. Capital offense, yep.

The most broad, definitive statement came in 1215 from the Catholic Church at large. Prior to that, it was more regional, not a thoroughgoing policy. But imagine, because what had happened is when the Vulgate got translated by Jerome, they translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin. When Jerobe did that translation, then the, not the Orthodox churches, but the Roman Catholic churches, that's the inspired version. Only thing is, as time went on, people didn't read Latin, right? And so why would you have anything other than an inspired version?

So if you didn't have it in Latin, you were just illegal. So finally, after dealing with this on a local level and kind of intermittently, finally in 1215, they said, no, You've got a copy of the scriptures that is, you know, other than what we allow, you're dead.

And whatever you have will be destroyed, absolutely destroyed. We will hunt down every last copy. And so that was kind of the threshold. Prior to that, it was more regional and up and down, but then it became a thoroughgoing, you shall not have a copy. Yeah, it took time for it to have that total, you know, kind of absolute statement. But prior to that time, it was already taking place that people had, you know, had the scriptures. Part of the part of the problem is that, you know, if people, people have the scripture in their own language, they're not going to come to the same conclusions.

And that's been seen over and over again. And so what you do to get rid of that is you make it so that they can't have a copy in their own language. That's why Tyndale said to one of the priest, he said, you'll soon see. I'll have the plow boy know the scripture better than you. So that he translated the Bible into English, the English of his day.

Other questions? Enough? Okay. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for this time that we have together. Thank you for your faithfulness throughout the centuries. We see that you have preserved your word, and you have preserved those who behold you through it. And we thank you for that. In Jesus' name, amen.