BibleBackgrounds: Introduction to Church History

Okay, so we're starting a new section. The new section is Church History and God's Word. This section is going to be broken into 13 weeks, so we'll be going through it in one quarter. The goal of today is to get you a little bit interested, gain some context for what we're going to be talking about, why you should care. I'm going to run through what we're going to go over over the next 13 weeks just really briefly so you can set your expectations and then we'll be away. If you haven't picked up your handouts, there are two. So if you grabbed one, you're about halfway there.

Today, why study church history? That's always a great question to ask at the beginning of any class. Why do I care? Why shouldn't I be wandering off and taking a different class? Next one, key time periods in church history. This particular week, week 28, will be the only week that we focus intensely on the plot. When you Take an English class and write your first paper. Invariably, it comes back with a lower grade than you expected. And up at the top is, you focused on the plot to organize your paper. You shouldn't do that. We're going to do that in the first week, and then thereafter, we'll go thematically.

How we got the Bible. So this is about how the New Testament and the Old Testament were collated, how it was kept separate, how it was treated differently than the other texts, and also trace through how we got into the English translation. History of Bible interpretation.

So this one turns out to be pretty interesting. There are various passages that people will interpret five or six different ways, and you're going to find out pretty quickly that some of that is worldview that they're bringing into it. And often these points of some controversy are always where different branches form. And so there are divisions and so those kind of go hand in hand. which is why the next week makes a whole heck of a lot of sense because it's talking about all of those different branches and organizations that form. And when I say all, we'll focus on just like a tiny subset where we're now up to something on the order of 20,000 denominations. think about that for a minute and try to reconcile that with First Corinthians. But nevertheless, we've got a bunch.

We'll focus on a few just to give a flavor and also to hit the high notes on some of the major ones. Next week we'll be on the relationship between church and government. Church and government have been mixed throughout time. Just looking back at the formation of the Catholic Church, for example, a lot of the A lot of the terminology used to describe various posts within the Catholic Church have direct correlations within the system of Roman government at that time. It wasn't accidental. They were actually quite intermingled, but even today here in the United States, church and government, it's still, you know, a mixture and they affect one another.

So, number 33. History of freedom martyrdom and persecution In in May we went to Washington DC my family and I and we got to go through the Holocaust Museum I don't I don't know if anybody else here has had that opportunity If you haven't you should absolutely go it's it's incredibly powerful but you get to the end of the Holocaust Museum and You're through what we consider the Holocaust and then you get into, okay, here are all the different forms of persecution that are going on today and it's really eye-opening. It turns out that if you take the history of Christians from like the 19th century back and take all of the folks who have been persecuted and killed for being Christian in that time period, and then you take the last hundred years, there have actually been a lot more in the last hundred years. So the persecution is still going on, it's a big deal, and so it's important to understand the history there.

History of churches and church governance, going along with the different denominations, there are a lot of different ways of running a church. We'll look through different organizations, how they run their various churches and how those evolved. Some of them are biblical and some of them are markedly less so. History of the doctrines of salvation. Was anybody in this class back in 2004 when Vern taught it? Tom, you were? Okay, so a few people. Something that came out around this that was fascinating to me is that the doctrines of salvation, they're things that we take for granted today.

I'm just absolutely for granted, like Christ's substitutionary death. So Christ died in our place. I mean, who doesn't know that in Christianity, right? But we've got no record of anybody grasping that concept in about the first thousand years after the New Testament. Not to say that there was nobody, but we certainly have no record of it.

So being able to trace the history of salvation is a very interesting course of action. History of spiritual growth teachings. Again, this is something that's evolved over time and it's interesting to see how that happens. History of end times teachings. Right now we've got a lot of different views of the end times. We've got folks who are like us who are eagerly looking forward to the rapture and to the Lord's coming and there are folks who said that's silly, you know, it happened 19 centuries ago. What are you waiting for?

So being able to trace the history of that ideology. History of missions. Missions is again something that's evolving over time. And then origins and history of Islam. Here we look at the origins and history of Islam not because they're part of the church, but because they grossly impact and affect the church throughout time, and certainly we're all very aware of that this century.

So, what's the process? This is a typical Holly Hills sort of class, which means that there are going to be all sorts of facts, graphics, timelines, handouts, and material for you to touch and smell or whatever. The idea behind it is that seeing these things makes it more real than just discussing general concepts. So there will be historical and replica samples.

One of the handouts that you guys have from today is an excerpt from the Geneva Bible. predates the King James 1611 version by about 50 years. By the way, Vern has a replica of the King James 1611 edition up here and it's absolutely fascinating. Just for fun, I'll read you a little snippet that he had highlighted that I thought was pretty good. His glory is like the firstling of his bullocks, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns. So we have unicorns in the 1611 King James. I'm not sure that was in the original Hebrew.

So anyway, one thing that we can always count on with Verne is that we're going to get a lot of electronic media. As part of this, he's a great collector of this sort of thing. So that'll be delivered via Dropbox or email. Talk to Vern, get on a list. If you're not already subscribed to his Dropbox folder, then you could do so and get more material than you could ever read in one lifetime on just the next 13 weeks of class.

Comparing church history with scripture. So this turns out to be quite important because a lot of church history is frankly embarrassing and so it's good to be able to take the history and line it up with scripture and see how those match up and both so that we can learn from the mistakes that may be there, but also when people come to us with silly, you know, silly reasons for not believing in God because, you know, the church did this. Well, it's very easy to simply reply, well, here's what scripture says and you're absolutely right.

That was horrid. That's not what we believe. questions. Nobody's asked any yet. Y'all are welcome to ask questions at any time. You're likely to get much more learned answers when Vern's standing up here than when I'm standing up here. But I'm certainly happy to take your questions as well. And then over the course of this class, we'll end up with probably a fair number of discussions. Yeah? I'm I'm I'm what? OK, well, that's good. All right.

So jumping into it, different views of history. And here, we're just going to look at three different views to contrast. They're a whole bunch. Materialism is one that was wildly popular among atheists. It's still relatively popular, though, interestingly, when we get to the Eastern philosophy one, that's gaining in some momentum among academics, which is surprising.

Anyway, materialism subscribes to one of two views, that history is random and meaningless, or it's very organized, mechanical, turn-the-crank and meaningless. But in either case, life ends up being meaningless, right? And so you even have this among the later philosophers with causal determinism that, you know, we're just sort of going through the motions and all of this has been kicked into gear. This view is actually held by some Christians as well, but just with a different sort of view that, you know, it's God who's turning the crank. And so it ends up being nonsense, but a lot of people have subscribed to this belief over time. Eastern philosophy and religion. This one is, in my view, pretty sad. The idea is that everything is cyclical.

And so, because you've got this reincarnation, you know, you're going to botch up this life, no problem, you'll get reincarnated, you'll get another shot at not botching it up next. Unfortunately, you're going to botch it up next, but don't worry about that because you're going to get reincarnated. Maybe you won't botch it up that time. unfortunately you will botch it up that time. And so that just kind of goes on and on and on and on forever.

And I saw this description and I'm going to read it because coming from where we come from, understanding a little bit about the sin nature, you can clearly see the impossibility of it, which is the ultimate goal of life, referred to as moksha or nirvana, is to understand in several different ways the realization of one's union with God the realization of one's eternal relationship with God, the realization of the unity of all existence, and then this is where it gets fun, perfect unselfishness, and the knowledge of the self as the attainment of perfect mental peace, and as a detachment from worldly desires. So as soon as we get there, then we get to go to nirvana, at which point we don't have to keep coming back and being reborn and reborn and reborn, knowing the sin nature as we do. I'm sorry you're stuck in that cycle forever. Little joke, why did the computer scientist never get out of the shower?

The shampoo bottle said, lather, rinse, repeat. Okay. So, that's Hinduism. Okay, so Biblical Christianity, this is the one that we like, of course. History is linear, and it's with purpose. And does somebody have a Bible they can snatch quickly? Because it's always good to not take my word for it, but to actually look it up in Scripture.

Somebody want to read Ephesians 3.11? I'll race you. Didn't think you'd need your Bibles in a church history class, did you?

So it turns out there is an eternal purpose. And so all of history is marching toward this eternal purpose. So biblical Christianity recognizes that there is a purpose to everything, that the people throughout history matter because they matter to God, which is something that's distinct from the other two that we looked at. when you say that it's cyclical.

As history cycles, they believe that it goes to a higher order. Is that why sometimes today we hear that we've reached a higher paradigm? And so as time goes on, which is actually the direct opposite of time, period. So are they saying that it always gets higher as time goes on?

Some do, because they want to believe that. So the thing to keep in mind is that when you talk about Hinduism or Buddhism, you end up with a very broad spectrum of beliefs under an umbrella, right? And so, yeah, some do. Some think that we're actually making progress, just like some Christians believe that we're actually making progress toward making this a more perfect place and that that's when God's going to come, right? So yeah, different groups believe different things, that's certainly one of them. Okay, so views of church history. There are two main views, one the covenant reform view and another the dispensational view. It turns out that the vast majority of people who would identify them as Christians in any sort of poll subscribe to the first and not the second one. So the first one says that Israel was chosen as people of God in the past. Unfortunately, they rejected his son, which really angered God. He now hates them. He's cut them off entirely. And he's given everything that he was going to give to them to us, the church.

So that's one view. And interestingly, these people would look at the restoration of Israel as one of, with one of two views. One is just sort of random, you know, gosh that's weird but, you know, I guess that's just an odd choice, odd chance. The other view is, you know what, God isn't done judging them so he's brought them together so that he can really lay into them one more time. So that's the covenant and the reformed view. That's of course not what we believe here at Holly Hills.

Dispensational view says that Israel was the chosen people of God in the past. However, when they rejected his son, God set them aside for the time being. He's now dealing with the church and then in the future he will bring Israel back. And so, in the first, Israel has no future, and in the second, Israel has a very distinct future. And so the question is, two completely opposite views, where would we find the truth? As we teach the kids in Sunday school downstairs, the truth is in the Bible, and so Let's look at Romans and see what God has to say about it.

So I say then, God has not rejected his people, has he? May it never be. For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people, whom he foreknew. Has God rejected his people? God has not rejected his people.

And for the Greek geeks that, may it never be, It's one of the 14 times where Paul says this exact construction. In the Greek, it's meganeto. And without going into the intricacies of it, you can translate it as, it is not possible to even conceive of thinking of that. So, just kind of wipe that out of your mind.

So, God's view? No. Still likes Israel. They're alright. But, let's see if there's anywhere else. So, now therefore says the Lord God of Israel, and we'll skip forward a few verses, I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them to do them good. How long is everlasting? You think that's going to go, like, after they reject Christ? Probably. Yeah, I would think so.

Dispensational view is the correct view and it's the one that we hold here. So this is a chart that only an engineer could love. It's a depiction of the Christian timeline and where we could stand within it. On the bottom you can see that it goes from creation to the cross to recreation at some point in the future. Prior to the cross, Everything is about looking forward with anticipation to the cross, and you can see this as early as Genesis 3. You can see it through the sacrifices. Then Christ dies on the cross, is buried, resurrected. Sometime period later, we here at Holly Hills come onto the scene, and we get to look forward to the fulfillment of God's eternal purpose, and we get to look back at the cross with gratefulness. So that's sort of the view of the Christian timeline.

It's not, you know, lather, rinse, repeat. Okay, so why study church history? And I'm guessing here that you guys don't have any answers on your sheet. Which means this is a test. All right, so you tell me. Why should we study church history? You have a list? I don't want you to have a list. Can I see your... All right, don't look at your list. Or better yet, challenge yourselves to come up with one or two that aren't on the list.

Why would we care? views of why even moderates studying church history should be able to answer at least a beginning along the lines of, this is what God forecasts today, preparing spiritual restrictions, how it all adds up. Okay, so one is evangelism, being able to talk to people who might challenge us on why we would care.

I'm sorry, do you have one? It keeps us from making the same errors. That's right. It keeps us from making the same errors. And I've got an example that hopefully we'll get to later on. I think it builds your faith, solidifies your faith. It can. It builds your faith, solidifies your faith. Any others? Okay, those were good. I think you actually hit like three of them on that list.

So one, we can better understand why churches and the world are like they are now. And so, somewhat to your point, Tom, something that that helps us with is to be able to better minister to these folks, because we understand the context of how they ended up in whatever worldview they ended up in, and so it gives us an understanding for them and ourselves, frankly. We can avoid repeating the past errors, Winnie. We're encouraged by the testimonies of those believers who lived in centuries past.

We can look at the saints that came before us and say, oh, they suffered persecution. Okay, that's like me. I suffered persecution. But Tyndale was strangled to death and then they hated him so much that after he was dead they burned him at the stake. So I'm not experiencing that, so that's encouraging. Yeah, that's good.

The amount of history in scripture implies that there's value in understanding history. history didn't matter, God probably wouldn't have stuck so much history in the Bible. So that's a lesson we can learn from him. And the amount of prophecy in scripture implies that God's telling us a story, and it's good to know that entire story. The rough sort of rule of thumb we've got about 10,000 verses that 10,000 prophecies that that are revealed in scripture about 5,000 of them have come to pass so we've got a lot to look forward to as well.

Church history timeline so when did the church start? When is church history at least on this earth done? So church starts at the moment of Pentecost with the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the scene and ends at the rapture, which we can all get excited about. Sad but true?

You think churches are still going to be around after the rapture? Well, we know that at the rapture, all existing believers are going to go. The Holy Spirit will kind of vanish from the scene as well, which means churches that are left here There are going to be plenty of them, I think. But there aren't going to be a whole heck of a lot of believers in them. So it's going to be just dry, mechanical, sad churches. So how are we going to approach church history?

Like I said, a couple ways you can slice it. You can either use the plot to organize your thoughts, or you can go thematically. Next week, We're going to rely on the plot. We'll go through 20 centuries in 50 minutes. And then thereafter, we'll be going through thematically looking at different topics.

Church history can be broken into different timelines. The timelines that we can break it into are not entirely arbitrary, but neither is this one set in stone. If you wanted to divide this sort of timeline up differently, I don't think that would hurt anybody's feelings. This is just how we can sort of organize different parts of church history and reason about them as a whole instead of having to take every minute in.

And the idea is, you know, 33 to 96, this is when the apostles are on the scene. 96 to 3, 12, Christianity is slowly being sent out. But between 312 and 590 it catches on like wildfire thanks to Constantine. However, we can question whether they're actually believers at that time, but they were certainly encouraged to be. We end up with this sort of dark period of medieval until Luther jumps on the scene in 1517-ish. And then we've got the present modern age.

We'll go through each one of these different time periods next week. So, a few key turning points in church history. The first one is just about as critical as you can get without Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. There is no church, so we'll take that one as absolutely important.

In 96, John, the last of the apostles, dies, strangely of natural consequences. In 312, Constantine comes on the scene and declares Christianity legal and actually actively encourages it. This is a really, really interesting story. I don't know if y'all have read much about Constantine. Immediately prior to his decree, the previous ruler had led the great persecution of Christians, where they were killed and their belongings were stolen just as a matter of course. Constantine, so the story goes, had this dream where if you march under this sign and it was the sign of a cross then you're going to be victorious and so He marched under the sign of the cross in his battles and was victorious and declared right at that moment Okay, everybody's going to be a Christian So there were a lot of self-professed Christians who may not have actually been, but if you look at Constantine's life, it's interesting. His mother was a believer, so he certainly understood the basics. And he abolished crucifixion. He abolished the gladiator games. He gave the belongings back to the Christians who had had those belongings stolen in the Great Persecution. He said that the clergy didn't have to pay any taxes anymore. He did a number of these things, so it's interesting to see that maybe he, in fact, was a believer.

Gregory I, also Gregory the Great, became the first bishop of Rome who was called a pope. There were a long line of bishops before that, but this is the first official pope. And thus began this long era of the Roman Catholic Church dominating both government and the religious world. Up until 1517, we will look a little bit at Luther here in a moment.

This story is really interesting. Do you guys know what happened roughly a year or two before he nailed these theses up on the door? system, which is a collated method of monitoring the surface. Yeah, exactly. So Luther got his hands on a Bible, which turned out to be quite dangerous at that time, and Bibles at varying points throughout history have been illegal simply because of how dangerous they can be. So Luther got his hands on a Bible and he thought he was trying to reform the Catholic Church. They had some misguided beliefs, he was going to help them understand, you know, these are misguided beliefs, and was pretty shocked with the response from the Catholic Church as a result of that. 1648, Peace of Westphalia signed that ended the Thirty Years War and thus began the modern era.

So these are some key turning points and they're what we're going to divide our timeline by, but what are some other important points in time in the history of the church that you think should be here but aren't? Yeah, the Nicene Bible. Sure. Yeah, that's a good one. What else? So when I taught church history to the Boy Scouts, I offered them a pack of gum if they could answer a question that was remarkably similar to this. So we'll come at it a different direction.

Why should the creation of the printing press be on this list? It put information in people's hands and not just the Bible. There were a lot of pamphlets that were printed out at the time. Among them, Luther's 95 Theses were printed as a pamphlet. So sure. Why would Alexander the Great's conquest deserve to be on the history of the church timeline? It predates the church.

Yeah. because it unified the language without which we wouldn't be able to get access to the Word of God so easily. And it unified the language with a language that's very well structured so that we can understand and there's less ambiguity than in, say, English. Back to why would we study history? Are we doomed to repeat? So the history of Luther and what he was coming up against is fascinating.

So the church at that time, which is the Roman Catholic Church, had just decided that they wanted to build St. Peter's Basilica. and they needed money to build St. Peter's Basilica. And they had money, but just not that sort of money to build it. And so they came up with this great idea, and it sounds insane to us today that you would be able to buy forgiveness of your sins, called indulgences, but put on your academic thinking hat for a moment, and then listen to this argument, and as a human not focused on Christ, you could almost start to buy it. So, Roman Catholic theology stated that faith alone, whether fiduciary or dogmatic, cannot justify man.

Justification, rather, depends on such faith as is active in charity and good works. The benefits of good works could be obtained by donating money to the church. See? So now your salvation is tied up in doing good works. Okay, do Christians believe that their salvation is tied up in good works today?

Yeah, plenty of them. A lot of them. You think we could twist their arm and have them believe that, you know, donating money to the church would be good works? Yeah, exactly. So are we doomed to repeat this? So here are a few of his 95 theses. And I had always pictured this as, you know, he wrote like a master's thesis and stuck it on the door. 95 of them, holy cats, that's a lot of writing. No, these were just, you know, I want to debate these topics with you and open a forum. And so here's a summary statement of what I want to debate.

So, number 35, it is not in accordance with Christian doctrines to preach and teach that those who buy off souls or purchase confessional license have no need to repent of their own sins. So, people are showing up in Luther's parish and he's going into the confessional and they're handing him these pieces of paper that say, you know, get out of jail free. He's like, OK, but I've just read the Word of God. And the Word of God says, you need to repent. You need to confess your sins. Right? They're given a piece of paper.

Christians should be taught that one who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better action than if he purchases indulgences. So still going, OK, I'm still accepting the Catholic doctrine around good works, but do the good works. Don't donate money to the church. Christians should be taught that he who sees a needy person, but passes him by, although he gives money for indulgences, gains no benefit from the Pope's pardon, but only incurs the wrath of God.

That's starting to sound like fighting words, but my favorite one is number 86, and it's definitely fighting words. Since the Pope's income today is larger than that of the wealthiest of wealthy men, why does he not build this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of indigent believers?

Right? Good question. You think that's going to stir up a firestorm in the Catholic Church? Oh yeah. But we're doing this today still, so we have not learned from history. We've got our televangelists sitting on the TV telling us that if we tithe our 10%, then God is going to give us favor. And by the way, tithing looks a whole lot like writing a check to him for his plastic surgery. Right? Okay.

Let's look at just a few items through this church history timeline so that you can solidify real places. Starting on the bottom left, we've got an aerial view of Caesarea Philippi. This is where Paul spent his last time here on this earth. Roman city at the furthest eastern edge of their empire. It was an important city for them. And it was not a podunk town. They actually had about 3,000 military station there all the time. Scooting over to look at the Gospel of John fragment, sort of in the middle a little bit over. This is the earliest fragment of the New Testament that we've got.

And you might be thinking, okay, well, that's just a teeny, itsy-bitsy sort of fragment, and by the way, isn't that, you know, 50 years after that book was actually written? As we go through this class, we're going to find out that it's absolutely embarrassing how many early Christian copies of that Bible we have, and how close they are to the time period in which they were written. So we'll do some comparing. I think the number two after the Bible in terms of number of copies and proximity in time is Homer's Odyssey, and it's just embarrassing the difference between how many copies of the Bible we have early. It's clear that it was going everywhere, being copied like crazy.

People viewed it as important, were stashing it at a time when it was illegal, and that God wanted it to survive to give to us. Christian coin that to me looks somewhat like a blob, but just so you understand on my screen, it doesn't look that much better. If you had remarkable eyesight, you'd be able to notice that there's a halo over the individual on the coin. This is from the time period after Constantine.

So creation of the Gutenberg printing press enabled copying and this was the first internet age when people could actually get content printed out in a way that they could read it and people got to stop hand-copying things. As an example, Martin Luther's 95 Theses, within 20 years after writing them, had made it everywhere within Europe. Everybody in Europe had a copy of those 95 Theses or could get their hands on it. So being able to copy the Bible, big time important, but also pamphlets as well had a big impact.

All right, so moving over the church, the castle church at Wittenberg, this is where Luther nailed up his theses, and by the way, he wasn't being disrespectful, going and hammering theses onto the door, you know, the heck with you, Catholic Church. That was actually the way that it was done. He posted, here are some topics I would like to debate with you on the door, and he did that by just tacking them up. Think of it as a church bulletin board.

And again, his goal was, hey, let's see if we can reform this church, I still like the Catholic Church, we've got some beliefs that I don't agree with, so let's discuss them and compare them with God's Word." Seems reasonable, right? And just really didn't anticipate the reaction. Maybe after reading number 86, he should have understood that there was going to be some consequence, but nevertheless Bottom middle, John Wycliffe translated the New Testament from the Vulgate, which was the Latin copy. So some of our Bible heritage comes from that direction.

Then over into the modern age, we've got Darby on the bottom right. And he is most commonly associated with the dispensational view. He was certainly one of the first to articulate it very clearly, but that view had been around for centuries, and maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that some throughout this course. And then John Wolford was, I guess he died back in 2003, a prolific writer in our time on theological topics. So, all right, examples of things you can bring. So I've got another handout. I think take one per family.

It's a nice church history timeline. So Verne will bring in his great-grandmother's Bible. We have a replica here of the King James 1611 version full of unicorns and all sorts of other great things that you can come and look at. Verne has sticky noted some interesting places in there. It does look like at some point in the process of this translation there was a categorical search and replace Israel for church which was an interesting thing for them to do. Noreen brought in a family tree of religious groups at some point. Basically, if you guys have your hands on anything pertaining to church history, that timeline, any interesting relics of that time period, bring them in.

We'd love to see them. So you guys have the Geneva Bible printout, and if you stare at it long enough and let your eyes fuzz out, you'll be able to read it. Geneva Bible was important because it was the first one that came along and put verse numbers in. And why would we care about having verse numbers?

Transmission of truth clearly and distinctly. Transmission of truth clearly and distinctly. Sure, a little more. But you find something that you want to remember and never find it again. That's right. So being able to have a point of reference so that you can get back to something that you saw. How about the ability to cross-reference and make notes that other people can understand rather than being Paul and saying, somewhere it says, you can say, turn your Bible to right there and then let's talk about that part. Is the rest of the world still today a hostile place? Sure.

Tyndale, his translation actually was used pretty heavily in the Geneva Bible and was used pretty heavily in the 1611 King James. The estimate is on the order of 70 to 80 percent of the King James actually came from Tyndale as well as the Geneva Bible. I enjoyed this quote from him responding to a clergyman I defy the Pope and all his laws, and if God spares my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost." So that was his goal, Bible in the hand of every single person, so that they would know Scripture so that they could know God. It turns out that if you start a sentence, I defy the Pope, then you do end up getting strangled and burned at the stake after you're already dead. But I'm grateful he did it.

So a few more pictures. So another picture of the castle church in Wittenberg. In the upper left, this is the Roman Colosseum. It's about the length of two football fields. And you can see all the caverns that were below the floor that was rotted out. That was for moving livestock, moving cattle, moving people and things underneath there. So picture all of that covered over.

A question for you. One of the major industries around this Colosseum was the importing of sand from Egypt. Why would they need lots and lots and lots and lots of new sand? The old sand got pretty bloody. Yeah, exactly right. So they had to continually cart that bloody sand out and put new sand in. You don't want to gross people out in the Colosseum.

And then the bottom picture there is Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. You can see in that image you can't. So let me show you a different view. This is one that I took when I was in Jerusalem. a few years ago. This is from roughly the same place. And you can see the Dome of the Rock that was built about 500 years ago. It's built on the platform where the temple itself was.

To the left out of this picture is the City of David. So City of David is actually just this little area down here outside the wall. Pretty small. Not super well maintained these days, but I guess in his time period it was a lot smaller and they didn't have to worry so much about walling the whole thing in.

So, fun question for you. Who's been to the Mount of Olives? Oh good, then this will be a fun question. Can you guess what's at the top of the Mount of Olives? Take a guess. Olive trees, okay, so that's one guess. You could almost picture that, right? Beautiful garden. Probably a church. A church, that's another good answer, another good guess. How about the Mount of Olives Bus Limited Taxi Service? Yeah, so that I was pretty surprised to get up to the top and find out. Yeah, but Christ is going to appear there nonetheless. That taxi company is not going to get in his way.

All right. The end. So any questions, comments? Thank you. Welcome. All right, let's close. Father, thanks so much for this opportunity to get together and take a sweeping view of church history. We know that the timeline is there, just driving forward linearly towards your eternal purpose, and we're grateful for that, that there actually is meaning, and that that meaning is found in you. It's in Jesus' name I pray. Amen.