Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012
Vern Peterman · Sep 2, 2012
Bible Bkgds/Church History, No. 35
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492632636570

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

As we're going through church history, as we began doing two months ago now, the beginning of July, we're now on the history of freedom and martyrdom and persecution. The title at the bottom, reverted back or something. Anyway, sorry about that. Freedom, martyrdom, and persecution. That's what we're looking at here. And so here in this one, What we'll be doing is stepping through time and looking at that. I have a little funny here.

Here's a woman goes to the post office to buy stamps for Christmas cards. She says to the clerk, may I have 50 Christmas stamps? And the clerk says, what denominations? And the woman says, oh my goodness, has it come to this? Give me six Catholics, 12 Lutherans, and 32 Baptists.

One of the things, some of you have signed up to be on the, we call it Church History Fully Loaded, where you download things from Dropbox. And so some of these resources that I have here, I'll place those in that Dropbox folder. Eusebius, The History of the Christian Church, covers the period of church history up to 324.

And then Fox's Book of Martyrs written during the Reformation period is another one that I'll put on there. Those are currently available. To get modern information more substantially, there is a website called persecution.com. It's Voice of the Martyrs, and they track things more currently in terms of what has been going on in recent times. And we'll also give another resource or two as we go through here.

Back in the New Testament time, here's 2 Timothy 3.12, Paul writes to Timothy, and this is the last letter, this is the one where he says, I'm poured out.

Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. So, into apostolic times, For about the first decade since the day of Pentecost, the church began, as recorded in Acts 2. Christians were thought of as a sect of Judaism. Why would they be considered a sect of Judaism?

They were all Jews, right? It wasn't until Acts chapter 10, where Peter presents the gospel to Gentiles, Cornelius' household, that you have Gentiles in the church. So they were naturally looked upon as just part of Judaism and got all the Jewish exemptions and that sort of thing.

They were treated that way. And then when the Gentiles became believers and then eventually outnumbered the Jews who were Christians, then things began to become different. They said, wait a minute, you're a Christian and you're not a Jew. This is different. So that was one change. Another change was that the Jews began distancing themselves from the Christians in a great many ways. And some of those were things we read about in the Book of Acts. What were some of the events where the Jews persecuted the Christians in the Book of Acts?

Can you think of anything? Stephen. The first martyr was Stephen. So that's one that showed up early on. And then later on, here's Paul and Thessalonica and the Jews run him out of town basically. He's running for his life. So you have Stephen who is the first Christian martyr. Acts chapter 8. And then you have the first martyred apostle. This is the only death of an apostle recorded directly in scripture. This is James, the brother of John. So you have James and John sort of as time-wise bookends to the apostles. James is the first one to die. John, so far as we have any record, was the last. So that in Acts chapter 12.

Also, during the New Testament times, there was freedom from wide Roman persecution for a time. And also, think of it this way. Here's the Roman Empire. Information doesn't get around real quickly, does it, in the Roman Empire, right? You can't just call up on your cell phone and say, you know, Caesar of old buddy. Let me tell you what's going on. So it takes a while for information to get spread around.

So here are the Christians starting off on kind of one far-flung corner of the empire. That by itself provided some insulation for a time. The other thing was that Christians were a small percent, less than 1% of the population until just before the middle of the second century. very small number of Christians relative to the entire empire. The other is in rural areas and open pathways. In other words, you get out into open areas, you could get some insulation from persecution just because of the fact that there just aren't very many people around.

Okay, talk about the Apostles. The other thing to note, although I said James is the one whose death is recorded in Scripture, we have some kinds of records about all of the Apostles, and John was the only one who did not die a martyr's death. So far as we have any record, all the others did. John, according to extra-biblical records, which don't have the reliability of scripture, John had been boiled in oil, but miraculously survived. So, okay, we can't kill him. Let's exile him to the Isle of Patmos. And then he died in about 96 AD.

In the Roman Empire, in order to prove that you were a loyal citizen, it was sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance kind of idea, you went to a temple in one of the cities and you did your duty of worshipping the emperor as deity in one of these temples. And of course each emperor had his own temple. So here's one for Hadrian, here's one for Domitian. Domitian was the one at the end of John's life. Hadrian was one after the New Testament era, just after.

And so when you would go in there, eventually what they would require is a certificate that said that you had gone in there. And everybody had to have this certificate. And if you didn't have your certificate that you'd gone in and done your worship of the emperor, then they say you better get one quick or you're in trouble. And that was one of the ways that the Christians were caught, is they didn't have a certificate. A libelous is what they called that certificate, and that was required. An official certificate that an individual had done the compulsory worship, emperor worship.

Christians often refused to comply. Some forged a certificate. I'll make one up. I didn't really do it, but I'll make one up. And then others complied under pressure. It was not considered a good thing to forge a certificate. Why would it not be considered, among Christians, a good thing to forge a certificate? It was dishonest.

That was part one. Yep. Any other reasons? Yeah, Tom? The stumbling block is like, OK, I've got this thing that says I worship Caesar. You know, that's a problem. So it was dishonest and you've got this thing that says you worship Caesar. Pardon? You weren't being true to your own beliefs. That's right. I've got this certificate that says that I worship the emperor even though I didn't. So I've got an honesty problem and I've got a consistency problem.

Yes. Was that a punishable idea? Yes. Okay, you have here on page 2 a chart, we won't go through it in detail, but basically there are 10 waves of persecution, starting with Nero during New Testament times, 10 waves of persecution in the Roman Empire, and finishing up, strangely enough, the worst of them was the last one right before Christianity was in 312 declared legal, and then the next year declared the official religion of the Roman Empire, on the western part and by 324 declared the only permitted religion. So that was quite a reversal to go from being intensely persecuted to being now this is the only one that's allowed. All the rest must change. So that period of time 64 to 312 was 10 waves of persecution and I'll leave it to you to go through the details on that. It gives the time periods, the emperor in charge, some of the key Christians at that point in time, and the nature of the persecution there in the third column.

These are some of the major ones. Now, the Colosseum in Rome. Very interesting. It has this little animated graphic. The Colosseum actually had a cover that could be put over the top of it, which is why you have that little animated thing in the corner. The Colosseum was built in the late 70s AD, and there are, I would say, regarding martyrdom and persecution, two different errors.

One is to say that there were absolutely no people. No Christians martyred there. The other is to say that there were a whole bunch. There were some. The reality is a lot of the martyrdom that was done in amphitheaters and things like that were done in various places around the Roman Empire, including North Africa. So this would be an artist's rendering of some of that where they would get the Christians in there and then set the animals on them.

Now, from 312 to 590. 312 was the time when Christianity was declared legal. To 590, by then the Roman Empire had all but fallen apart completely. By 590 you had Gregory the Great, he was called, who was the first one acting in the full realm of what we call a Pope. So anyway, that's the reason for picking that time. The tables were turned.

Once Christianity was first declared legal, then the only legal religion, persecution, turned from being against Christians to being against those who were overtly not Christians. If you were a pagan priest, you were in trouble. They were driven to the outskirts and the wild lands to carry out those pagan priestly duties or roles. But within less than a century, those who were Christians but stood against the organized church in some practice became the persecuted. For example, refusing infant baptism became fatal. I'm not going to have my child baptized. I don't find that in the Bible. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't save my kid. I'm not going to have my kid baptized. Well, so what they would do is kill the parents and then baptize them anyway. Yes?

So what was motivating the legalization of Christianity? Ah, this was under Constantine. Constantine had a vision under this sign conquer, and it was a cross. So he had all his soldiers put the cross on their shields. So on the basis of that vision, and he was victorious militarily, then Christianity turned from being this highly persecuted movement into being First declared legal, but then the official religion in the western part of the Roman Empire. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But anyway, that's how it came about.

It was Constantine who made the reversal in the western part of the empire. Here's the division. This western and eastern division happened in 284 AD. And what you find then is the empire was broken into two parts, an eastern and a western part, and they actually had separate caesars and emperors and governors for each part. And that ended up making quite a difference in terms of what happened with the churches. What would be some of the reasons why they divide up the empire east and west like that? Why would they do that?

What was the prominent language in the west? Latin. How about the East? Greek. So you have different languages was part of it and along with that some different cultures, right? So you had different languages, different cultures. Also the Empire at one point in time extended all the way from the Persian Gulf all the way up to the British Isles. a huge, huge area, now consisting of a number of different countries. The management of that without any modern technology was just getting unwieldy. This huge empire. So splitting it in two was one of the ways of trying to manage things a little bit better, getting some responsiveness.

Now, in Sebaste, which is, you see that red arrow there? There's a very interesting thing that happened. You see, in the western part, Christianity had been made legal, and even the official religion. But in the east, at the time, the emperor was anti-Christian. So you had a strange oddity taking place there in the Roman Empire.

The account in 320 AD of the 40 soldiers of Sebast, And this has been made into a ballad. It's an actual historical event made into a ballad. If you go on YouTube and search for 40 brave soldiers for the Lord, you'll find a YouTube video that tells the story there. I'll give you the brief account, and that is that the order was given to this military outpost on a frozen lake. on the edge of a frozen lake, the order was given, everybody must sacrifice to the Emperor, everybody must do their duty to worship the Emperor.

Forty soldiers refused, and so they were given over to Aglaios, the jailer. But they had to wait until they got a higher commander to come in to give the death sentence to these soldiers. And so Aglaios held these soldiers, these 40 soldiers who refused, held them for a week. And finally the higher commander came in and said, yes, these 40 must die.

And so what they did is they bound them out in the middle of the frozen lake while other soldiers were on the perimeter making sure that none of them ran away. And they were told, however, you can change your mind and come running in and do your sacrifice and you'll be okay so the soldiers sat out there and sang out there on the ice and sang and their singing got weaker and weaker and finally one of them ran into the bathhouse but collapsed at that Aglias the jailer ran out onto the ice 40 soldiers for Christ So anyway, that's the account of the 40 soldiers at Sebasti.

Now, Emperor Theodosius, who by the way, he made this pronouncement at 413, he was only born in 401, so he wasn't quite a teenager. He had become an emperor at age 7. He gave this announcement in edict against the Anabaptists, those who would baptize without official church authority, or would deny the validity of infant baptism, commanding that they be put to death. This was in the eastern part of the Empire.

From then on, throughout the Roman Empire, it became a death penalty for any parents to deny infant baptism. or to fail to recognize the baptism that was done when the child was an infant. Death penalty against them. This was a movement that had no name. Why would it have no name? They were never allowed to develop any sort of a substantial group. They got killed off.

Now 590 to 517, almost a thousand years, this is the time of the beginning of Gregory the Great being the first full Pope and Bishop of Rome. 590 to 517 when the Reformation began, when Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door at Wittenberg. So almost a thousand year period of time there.

Within the organized church being in generally greater control and being aligned with political and military powers, persecution was generally against individual Christians and movements not under the blessing of the organized church. And the tendency was not to just persecute them slightly, but wipe them out thoroughly. Wipe them out thoroughly. Freedom was typically found in greater degree in rural areas and on the fringe of established domains, and with a few noblemen. There were a few noblemen that you could run to, and other than that, you were in trouble. Yeah. So our forefathers, when they said freedom of religion, they're basing that on all this. Yeah, and we're going to get to that. We're going to get to that, because that was a huge and pivotal point.

Here's a specific case in 1210, under orders of Pope Innocent III, who wasn't all that innocent. Soldiers assigned to kill a group of heretics called the Cathars in Béziers, France, asked how to tell which ones were heretics and which were not. So the Abbot of Citeaux told the soldiers, kill them all, God will know his own. Just slaughter them all. Just go in the city, Every single one. Don't ask questions. Don't try to decide. Just kill everyone. God will know his own. By some estimates, up to 100,000 were killed in that attack, being of various spiritual persuasions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes it was. But that was, and 1210, that was during the latter part of the Crusades. So this doesn't include the slaughter and the Crusades.

Jan Hus, who was prior to the Reformation, 1374 to 1415, a Czech priest who stood on the principle he would not comply with anything that could not be shown in Scripture. If you don't show me in Scripture, I will not comply. And so he called for reform, he was in prison for quite some time, pressed to recant, then burned at the stake for refusal, July 6, 1450.

Now, then we have the character and magnitude of the Reformation, starting in 1517, was such that political and military forces on each side, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist, all those sides were ultimately brought to a stalemate. fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting, and in some regions, as we mentioned previously, more than half the population was killed off by these wars between the Catholics and the Lutherans and the Calvinists.

The overwhelming persecution after this ended, however, was against groups or individuals who were not politically and militarily aligned. The Anabaptists, the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists would all do infant baptism. Those who didn't do that were killed by all of them. These were caught in a domain with a contrary persuasion, so they would basically be pushed around in different places in Europe to find some place where they had some degree of freedom.

So, the 1554 burning, and it gives a couple of Anabaptists shown here in a woodcut. About 4,000 to 5,000 Anabaptists were killed, and we would basically be in that category because we don't practice or believe in infant baptism. We would have been in that category. killed during the Reformation by Lutheran Calvinists and Roman Catholic soldiers and civil enforcers. Typically it was by burning, strangling, or drowning. The drowning was a favorite because it's the whole Baptist idea, right?

Hold you under. Now here's an interesting one. Here is Balthasar Hubmeier was stretched on the rack by Zwingli. Calvin was in Geneva. Zwingli was the leader during that Reformation period in Zurich. And so here's Balthasar Hubmeier, one of the Anabaptists. He was put on the rack, tortured by Zwingli. Here is what he wrote.

Christ did not come to butcher, to murder, to burn, but that men might have life and that more abundantly. So long as a man lives, we should pray and hope for his repentance. A Turk or a heretic is to be overcome not with sword or fire, but by patience and weeping. We are therefore to wait patiently for the judgment of God. Every Christian has a sword against the godless. That is the word of God."

Pretty good, huh? There were centuries, however, of Anabaptists, and even the Roman Catholics acknowledged it. The fellow Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius, president of the Council of Trent there just in the middle 1500s, He said, were it not that the Baptists, and he meant the Anabaptists, have been grievously tormented and cut off with the knife during the past 1,200 years, they would swarm in greater numbers than all the Reformers. Many, many, many died because they would not baptize their children or they would not acknowledge that baptism as being valid.

Yes? Oh, they just pass them off to somebody else. You know, you got an orphan child and so, you know, you do whatever you have to do. You know, you got, you have an aunt and uncle that'll take care of them or somebody, you know. But they're baptized. Yep. Got them baptized.

Now, another of the French Huguenots. My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Lucius de la Verne, came through here in 1859. He was of Huguenot descent. Huguenots were French Calvinists. Here's one instance. They asked for an official authorization to gather for a wedding.

Then, beginning August 24, 1572, a few thousand of them were slaughtered. That was called the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Eventually totaling about 70,000 dead by October 1572, and the number swelled to somewhere around 100,000 before too many months passed. This is a commemorative medal for the slaughter of the Huguenots and a commemorative medal that was done in honor of the one who ordered it, who ordered the slaughter.

Now from 1648, which is that was where we talked about the Treaty or Peace of Westphalia, that ended the Thirty Years War. So from that time into the present, After 1648, persecution continued within certain boundaries, and the Huguenots were one of those groups. But there were others. The Inquisition from the Catholic Church continued into the early 1800s in those countries that were controlled by Roman Catholic leaders.

In the American colonies, Patrick Henry was deeply moved by seeing a pastor's flesh whipped off his back to kill him. It wasn't to just punish him and let him go. He was whipped until he was dead. And the whip that they used was the kind that just tore flesh. And so Patrick Henry was seeing this guy and the rib bones were showing through his back. That moved him. The problem that that pastor had is he had not gotten a permit from the Anglican Church to preach.

So for that he was killed. Essentially I'll say tortured to death. Patrick Henry saw that and he went right after that to the Virginia Convention and that's when he made the famous statement, give me liberty or give me death. March 23rd that year. So that's part of the influence that I was referring to, Stan, having to do with our Founding Fathers. They said, enough of this. This is crazy.

We're killing people because they don't have a preaching permit. Now, defining persecution. No nation is completely free of persecution wherever Christianity is practiced. In Western democratic nations, persecution may occur randomly and spasmodically despite the assumption of religious freedom. These nations we refer to as mostly free. Other nations may be described as hostile or restricted according to the level of persecution.

The State Department, and they're going to do it just this month, the State Department issues annually a report on religious freedom, what's going on around the world, And that report is brought to Congress and then posted. We have this website there where it's posted. And so currently, I just checked, the one from 2011 is what's up there. But soon, probably within a few weeks, the more recent one for this year will be posted up there.

Persecuted Christians, and I'm sorry, I looked at the copy, it kind of got muddied up, but these are places on persecution.org or persecution.com? Is it .com or .org? Yeah, I said .com. I think it should be correct to .org. But persecution, It has this map here, and if you click on each of those dots, it then pops up with what's the status of the issue in each of those places.

So you can track that. We do have a few places in the Western Hemisphere where there are persecution issues. In great part, it's in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, in the warmer parts of those parts of the world. Substantially, but not entirely, Islam is the greatest cause for persecution at present.

On the website, there they have a Pakistan Christian girl being charged. She's physically handicapped. She's accused of blasphemy there in Pakistan. She's in this high-security prison. It's just a girl, and she's handicapped, but that's where they've got her.

Kyrgyzstan, there was a Christian worker there, filed a case against a village Islamic leader, along with a small mob, attacked the worker and his friends as they attempted to distribute humanitarian items. So it wasn't even distributing Christian literature, it was just humanitarian supplies. Pardon? Yeah, food, toothpaste, clothing, that kind of thing.

So, here's in Kenya. What happens in Kenya is the Muslims come from over the border and they killed 17 Christians. So this kind of thing gets reported and updated on this website. You can pick up on those. Nigeria, a pastor survived an attack by the Muslims.

Gordon Conwell Seminary in 2010 worked up some statistics. They gave a figure just short of 160,000 Christians are martyred every year throughout the world. So that's a fairly recent figure. Another statistic that's impressive, more Christians have died for their faith in the last hundred years than all prior centuries combined.

We hear about the Roman persecution and it was real. But it was only in the Roman Empire and it was only in waves and there was less than 1% of the population was Christian up until about the middle of the second century. So it's just simply a matter of population growth and the continuing persecution that has done it.

Here we have a picture of a guy codenamed Pencil. He was a young man martyred at age 19 in North Korea. martyred for his faith in Christ. He and three other friends, who also had code names, things like Paperclip and Eraser, things like that, also died as well. His three friends died and then he got away and then he was caught.

So just to kind of case in point, In my own instance, and we do have outbreaks of different kinds of persecution, my own instance, in the spring of 1971, I was taking a class in Eastern religions. And I had written a paper at the start of the semester, and it reflected a Christian viewpoint. So the professor was going down the list, and he says, Peterman, you're a Christian, aren't you? I said, yeah. He says, stand up. Okay. I stand up. Whack! Across the face. And some of the kids say, do it again. And some say, don't, this is stupid. But I stood there. And he didn't hit me again.

But it was very interesting. It got a lot of attention from a lot of the kids in the class. The church that I was going to had a pretty good music team, and they had a recording there of some of the music that was done at the church, and they actually made an album. And on the album is this professor's son. He's a believer. So, very interesting. Now, any of you have any accounts of persecution that you've encountered? Yes. Not me. Okay.

But friends of the family, he's a missionary with Aviation Fellowship in Mozambique. He was just about three or four weeks ago, his family were attacked in their home by Muslims. He was cut up. He protected his family. So he did a lot of damage to his arm. He was airlifted. in South Africa, so we didn't have it prepared, but they're back in the States now. Okay. Anyway. That was just a few weeks ago. Just a few weeks ago. Okay. All right. Yeah. Any other accounts, instances?

Yeah, we're afraid that it's been a strange follow-through. I can't remember what the commission organization was one that was sent. My wife did that, and then he went into missions. He went over, what was his country? One of those stands. So he was captured at this time. It was the third year. And they cut off one of his fingers. The one that points to God. That one. Yeah.

But the economic was released when he was just one little tiny bit behind some facts. And so at the end of his testimony about the way it breaks, I hear through a great deal of difficulty. He wouldn't say anything about it. It's not a quote-unscripted, it's not an out-of-memory book.

About this same time I told you about this, Professor John Dimitru, I was in the East San Francisco Bay Area and I met a fellow whose name was Rick. He had been with the Hells Angels and he had become a believer. And it was real interesting to see how the Lord had changed his life. He was killed a week after I met him. The Hells Angels caught him underneath an overpass and did him in.

All these people who are killing all these other people, obviously, I shouldn't say obviously, but it seems like that they are not even in touch with the grace of God. I mean, you have this mass of humanity that's out there just doing the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing, and yet they profess to be Christians, or Anabaptists, or Calvinists, or Lutherans, or whatever. and still react in that way.

I don't get that. I think one thing that happens is it is quite possible for people to be culturally Christian or culturally oriented to a particular group. This is really at the root of what is behind the conflict in, for example, Ireland, where you've got Catholic Southern Ireland and Protestant Northern Ireland. So it's like the Ozarks. Yeah, in other words, it's really not so much that these people are deeply of a particular faith, even, but more so that it's kind of a cultural thing. And so it's like, this is my cultural heritage rather than, you know, I really hold this deeply.

Do you think it's because there was so much illiteracy? during that period of time that people didn't read, couldn't read, and so they were forced to follow the people that they felt were doing good. Well, I think that's, you know, there are several different reasons why people break into different groups and why people justify in their minds, you know, doing things that they do.

In reality, I mean, a lot of it's ignorance of God's Word, John Chrysostom was one, we have recorded a great number of his, called homilies, sermons. And he wrote about lots of things, but he also wrote about, you know, God hates the Jews, and if you're a good Christian, you will too. and which, of course, is completely unbiblical. God does not hate the Jews. God loves the Jews, and by the way, it's a Jew who died for you.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. This is horrible stuff. Yes? When we were at Stanley Mission, our first group of kids, we said to the Bible people, they had called me up and said, my daughter, you came from a Christian outlet, and I'm in your heart. And I said, well, I work for the Lord. And you have to get their permission to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and then carrying on slaughtering Christians. Yeah, I think there's a lot of ignorance and twisted ideas that got entrenched. And in fact, even the idea that you hear about Christians, they'll talk about, well, we've got to get them into the kingdom. Or they'll talk about the church as the kingdom.

But that whole idea is founded on God hates the Jews. That doesn't mean that that's what they all embrace and teach, but that's where it got started. God hates the Jews, and the Jews killed their king, and so now Christ is the church's king. That's the idea. The Jews killed their king, and so now Christ is the church's king. That's the transfer that goes on in some people's minds. And therefore God hates the Jews. Yes?

But his organization is Worcester Martyrs. And he escaped Pakistan by the skin of his teeth. And so they're still looking for him. They're still looking. And he goes under a suit and then he goes all over again and speaks about the miraculous things that God has done in his life. And he goes around the floor. Every time we don't hear from him for a little while, we're... Yeah, you wonder. They don't need us, and they're giving that address on BBC, and the Post Office is watching them, and all that. That's everything that he's gone somewhere preaching.

It leads to more addresses of the post of influence in America also, and how it speaks right to the very top of the leadership of the country. How they've gone in, and they're bringing in people that want to develop this nation into a Muslim nation. I think it's so hard to view this from our stance in this culture, where we actually do have freedom. Because before the United States of America, before our forefathers drew up that wonderful Constitution and Bill of Rights, this didn't even exist in the minds of these people that you could be free.

That's the way it looks. I mean, I don't see anything that we've talked about prior to 1776 that even came close to providing freedom for people. So the thought... I mean, how can we even imagine what it was like back then when we live in this period?

Essentially, the idea of having religious freedom is only a couple centuries old. Only in the last couple of centuries. And here in the United States, a little bit before that. But yeah, religious freedom is something that we easily take for granted, but it's not...

We're not willing to stand up for what we have in comparison to this. I mean, it's like having the golden egg and giving it a goose. Sometimes in America it's hard to know that you're being persecuted if it's not positive. Yeah, it's generally not all that evident. So yes, should we stand up? Absolutely. I think sometimes you don't know you're being persecuted immediately so you can't actually state what is true. Yeah. That's for the underground itself. Yes, yeah. How do we recognize it?

Yeah, so I think the first step is teaching people to recognize what American persecution looks like as opposed to Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So why a fourth grader? You can't say things like that. I mean, a fourth grader.

You know, when I, it was 30 years ago this year, I went and taught at the high school where I had gone to high school. I went back there to teach. And one of the classes I was teaching was biology. And towards the end of the year, I had already given my notice, you know, I'm going to be done here. So I just, I told the students and I told even all the teachers, I'm going to teach creation. And so I even had a couple of teachers come and listen.

So, real interesting. They couldn't do much, you know. But I just, in that instance, because I'd given my notice and it was towards the end of the school year, I just taught creation. That's fine. That's what we'll teach. You know? I believe Jesus is sharing. Yeah. When these kids will be, you know, in what's major, you know. Yeah. They have no idea of anything in the Bible, anything like that. There is a growing ignorance. You'll get more Bible on Jeopardy than you will in a lot of places. Well, let's see, let's pray. Lord, we do pray for leaders everywhere, that there may be the opportunity to share and spread the gospel.

We thank you for the freedoms that we have enjoyed in this country and in our time. And we pray also for the boldness to take advantage of that freedom that we do have. And we're thankful, though, that even the difficulty and the persecution has purpose. And it even has spiritual value. And so we thank you for that. And we just thank you for the freedom we have here to discuss these things and to present them. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.