Polemics - Discernment - Orthodoxy: Russian, Greek, Antiochene, etc,

And this is on the Orthodox churches, Russian, Greek, and Tayikene, Serbian, and there's a bunch of different ones like that. Coptic is another one. Anybody had any contact with any of these Orthodox churches? We used to have a Greek, what's that? Yeah, we used to have a Greek cultural school that actually met here at Holly Hills. This was over a decade ago. And one of the reasons it met here is for some reason the Greek Orthodox Church, which isn't too far away, the other side of Leachdale, for some reason they couldn't accommodate them there. So they had a Greek cultural school that met here, but that was from the Greek Orthodox connection.

And let's see, I got a call, oh this is again over a decade ago, from a fellow down in Arizona trying to get out of an Antiochian Orthodox monastery. And he wanted help getting out of there and getting some things clarified. So at any rate, and so there are different points of connection with some of these Orthodox churches. With the With the Muslim military activity with ISIS and other ones, a lot of the Christians that they're encountering are those of Orthodox background, some kind of Orthodox church background.

But it's one of these things where we kind of have to go back in church history In the first century under the ministry of the apostles, churches were founded first in Judea and Samaria, then established in other areas of the Roman Empire, as shown on the map. They also were established in areas to the east as well. But other areas where churches were or may have been established which are outside the area of the map are not shown. So Babylon and the Parthian Empire and Madras, India, that was where Thomas went.

Other than the divisions within a church mentioned by the Apostles, such as 1 Corinthians 1, the church was one body which had elders among the believers in each city. Once the Apostles went into an area, they established elders as the highest level of authority.

And even at that, the elders are rather anonymous. We only know the name for sure of one elder, and that's James, half-brother of Jesus. Other than that, the elders is amazing. We talk about elders repeatedly, but fairly anonymous. So it's not a high personal profile situation.

From the examination of the New Testament, the apostles never intended to leave in place any higher human authority among the churches than a biblically qualified plurality of elders in each local church. When Paul and Barnabas went into southern Galatia, into places like Iconium and Lystra, they went through initially and evangelized, and then their loop back was to appoint elders. As I pointed out last week, about 100 AD, so the ink was just drying on the book of Revelation, Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch both began setting themselves up as individual bishops, as a position over other churches. What should have happened is that Clement and Ignatius should have been roundly and soundly rebuked for trying to do that. Instead, what happened is that what they started to do became the standard. And you started having bishops over multiple churches.

Never biblically, right? Never biblically. They established what was called apostolic succession. And as we mentioned a couple Sundays ago with the Roman Catholic Church, the Bible does not teach apostolic succession. The Bible teaches doctrinal succession. Paul writes to Timothy, these truths that you've heard from me among many witnesses, teach to faithful men who in turn teach others also. So doctrinal succession is what the Bible teaches, not apostolic succession, where the apostles appoint somebody as a bishop and the Bishop then appoints the next one, etc. The Bible does not teach that.

So then they started adding doctrines and practices over the subsequent centuries, in addition to these bishops being over multiple churches. Here's some examples. 170 AD is when they began calling pastors priests. 220 AD is when the Lord's Table, as we'll have this morning, and baptism were both seen not as symbolic but spiritually effective. They accomplished something. And so that evolution over time is what ended up producing the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches.

So, one of the things that also happened politically that ended up creating a separation, is that the Roman Empire was so big, it at one point in time went all the way from Kuwait, in the Persian Gulf, from Kuwait all the way to the southern part of Britain. The Roman Empire was that big. Just a huge area. And administratively, without electronic communication, That just began to be difficult to administer. So they actually, in 284 AD, actually split the Roman Empire into two administrative areas.

Now, there were some other differences between the East and the West as well. Here's one of the curious things. Alexander the Great went and put in place essentially Koine Greek, the Greek of the New Testament, in the eastern Mediterranean. And so that began to have a Greek language tradition and cultural tradition. But over in the west side of the Roman Empire, Latin still remained the prominent language. What's strange is after an empire begins to fall apart and degrade, the language that was established by the empire continues on for centuries. That's true of the Greek background of Alexander the Great, and it's true of the Latin background in the West.

So they had cultural differences, they had language differences between the East and the West, And so the Roman Empire began, just as an administrative decision, began to fall apart into two pieces. By 395 AD, everything had come completely apart between the East and the West. Now, the churches that got established there were the Roman church, the Bishop of Rome, and then in the Eastern churches you had the other bishops, and depending on the size of the population that those bishops were governing, they actually ranked the bishops. And the Bishop of Rome was primary, and the Bishop of Constantinople was secondary. And then they had other bishops that were underneath that. So is there a biblical basis for that? Ranking bishops. There isn't a biblical basis for bishops. There isn't a biblical basis for ranking bishops.

But that's the way it worked. So what they would do, starting with Constantine, Emperor Constantine, who came in and said, OK, we're going to get these bishops together. And he called together this first council, the Council of Nicaea in 325. And very interestingly, one of those bishops was Saint Nicholas, where all this mythology derives from. He was probably pretty skinny, actually. The rotund guy with the red suit and the white trim and all that, that's all mythology. But he was right on a Mediterranean coastal city, was actually where he was from, where they just about never get snow.

So, anyway, so they had the Council of Nicaea and a lot of people get the idea that Constantine went and directed a lot of things at that council and that was not the case. He did call the council together, but he didn't dictate anything to them. Then you have the Council of Constantinople, the one at Ephesus.

And who had been the primary pagan deity at Ephesus? Anybody remember that? Diana or Artemis, right? And so here is the riot, if you will, in the theater. Great is Artemis of the Ephesians is what they're chanting. And it has to do with trying to suppress Paul's influence there in Ephesus. But this is the place. And this is, interestingly enough, where they declared Mary as Theotokos, the God-bearer.

Then they had other councils, one at Casa Grande, and then at Constantinople, we have Constantinople II and 553, Constantinople III, and that's actually in two parts, 680 and 692, and then Nicaea II and 787. They'd have these councils and decide various things and it seems as time went on they did crazier and crazier things. So here's what happened with the Orthodox churches. The Orthodox churches began to get the idea that it was only the Father Only the Father that sent the Holy Spirit.

The Bishop of Rome said that the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit. And that was the initial point of split, arguing over that point. Now who was right on that point? The Father and the Son, which is chapter 15 and chapter 16 of the Gospel of John, both places. It's the Father and the Son. So that's what they initially split over, and actually on that point, the Bishop of Rome was correct. And so here's where they started splitting up. Before that, they were a federation of bishops. And so the split began with that. and continued on for centuries to follow, but a lot of the Catholic and Orthodox Church teachings remained very similar. Now the one thing that was different is that the Orthodox Churches all went off into inspired icons. They would have icons like paintings on the wall, and those were inspired, and they would study the icons over scripture.

Anybody ever seen those? I've seen them. I've gone up, looked in the church, and they've got the icons. In the Catholic church, they'll go with statues. I remember in Germany visiting Pfirzenheiligen, 14 holy ones, and again those statues along the wall. Yes, Roy? Although there are different splinters of this Orthodox Church, Russian, Greek, Serbian, and Tychean, and Coptic, and different ones, What they have in common is these icons. And the icons, as you see, was Messiah 2, 787, that church council, that was where those got cemented in place.

And they take more inspiration and thought and meditation over the icons than scripture. Which is a little hard for us to imagine, but yes they do. So what's to see? They just stare at it for an hour? Yeah, they'll stare at the icon and think about it and contemplate it and think of all the implications of the icon. For us it's a little hard to imagine because it's more subjective. But yeah, they'll put quite an emphasis on that.

So the Roman Catholic Church headed off with essentially idols, statues, and then the Orthodox churches went off with their icons. Yeah, Gail? Yeah, I'm just wondering how available was the written word even to the bishops, especially as you got lower down in the ranking and in teaching the people Did they have enough access to that to be able to teach from the word? Or was the icon and the statues kind of a replacement, just to remind, like, of a live story or something? Yeah, teaching from the word began to be degraded. But was it available? It was available, but an emphasis not put on it. Yeah, as time developed, there was increasingly just not an emphasis on it.

Because, like in the Roman Catholic Church, you'll talk to people that are devout Roman Catholics, and it's all about the rituals. It's not about studying the Bible. Is it available? Yeah, it's available, but, you know, the rituals are what take over. Similar with the Orthodox churches, except for the emphasis being on the icons. And so those things essentially replace scripture and the idea that you're actually going to teach people and exposit the word of God and read it and things like that began to be a very secondary thing. and you come to church to take the Lord's table, which they began to call the Mass, and you go through the rituals, but the actual teaching of the Word and the reading of the Word becomes very secondary. And it was available.

In addition to having Bibles, they had what they called lectionaries. And those would be like sections of scripture, only set up just to read. And so some places they would read that, but no real serious exposition. And then sometimes the exposition was really problematic.

John Chrysostom, for example, is one kind of in this Orthodox tradition, profoundly anti-Semitic. If you're a good Christian, you'll hate those Jews too. God does. You could get excommunicated for having a Jew come and bless your crops. So a lot of it drifted very anti-semitic, teaching from the word, the reading of the word.

Yes, it was available, and there were monks who would spend hours and hours copying and all that, but not an emphasis on it. In the 5th century, you had to have your infants baptized, otherwise it was capital punishment for the parents. And then they baptize them anyway and give them to somebody else. Give their child to somebody else. Yeah. Today we have the kids going to catechism and things. I wonder when that started? The branches?

Yeah, the idea of catechism, that's been something that's been Fairly long-standing, however, again, not focused on the word per se, but focused largely on traditions, passing along traditions. Because you didn't have the printing press, everything had to be hand-copied, so it wasn't abundant availability in the homes as much. As a matter of fact, in a lot of places in the homes, it was forbidden. for a number of centuries for people to actually have a copy of the scripture.

There's some of that going on as well, especially under Constantine Because imagine he comes in 312 and says Christianity is now legal, after having severe persecution. Next year, he says Christianity is now the official religion. And then, a little over a decade later, he says Christianity is now the only permitted religion. So, with only about 10% of the empire actually being Christian, You've got a lot of people to adapt over to Christianity. So what you ended up doing was taking a lot of the pagan traditions, and even the Catholic records will say this, a lot of the pagan traditions are then brought over into Christianity.

Ever seen a cross with a circle around the cross? This is the disc of the sun god with a cross put over the top. You can keep your circle, your disc, as long as you put a cross over the front of it. And so, for example, the various practices and rituals and doctrines would be taken from the pagan religions and brought into Christianity that way. And it was ultimately similar kinds of things done in the Orthodox churches. So, and that's one reason why you'll find some variation is because of variations locally, you know, what was the tradition in this area before Christianity came in place. Yeah.

How are these people, what qualifications did these people have to have to go to these councils? Did they pick knowledgeable people or did they pick political people? It was, you're picking a bishop, For example, St. Nicholas was bishop over Myra. And so they would have a bishop in some of the major cities and they would be people who are literate. The educational system was not quite like our current structure. But yeah, often they were folks who were fairly intelligent. Over time, however, politics began to have a bigger and bigger place.

And one thing that ultimately was different with the Orthodox churches than the Catholic church, comparison and contrast here, is that the Catholic church had a reformation, that is, there was a reaction to it. The Orthodox churches never had a reformation. So there wasn't Protestantism, the non-Catholic viewpoint, and by the way, I don't consider myself a Protestant, But Protestantism moved into the areas of the Orthodox churches. It was not something that began right in the areas where the Orthodox churches were.

It moved in from the areas where the Roman Catholic Church had been in power. So, for example, the Baptists move into an area that was dominated previously by Russian Orthodoxy. Yes, they did and they also pitched out those who didn't agree. They pitched out those who, like for example, one of them during the time of John Chrysostom that I mentioned earlier, was Arius.

Arius did not teach the deity of Christ. As a matter of fact, his teaching was very much like the Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't teach the deity of Christ. And the Holy Spirit is not a person. So, that's very much like the Jehovah's Witnesses. But Arius was one who held the non-deity of Christ and the non-personality of the Holy Spirit.

He was pitched out of one of these councils, but he continued to propagate his teachings through catchy tunes. He'd get these choirs together and they'd go around singing with this false doctrine. And so in order to counter that, John Chrysostom got a group together, and they would sing, and they'd have the battle of the bands, so to speak, trying to go against each other, singing these tunes. So if you ask about, for example, biblical teaching, the medium for communicating, in this case, was music. That's how they did this doctrinal tension with singing competitively. one versus the other.

But different ones that were pitched out was Arius was one, another one was Pelagius, another one was pitched out by some of these councils. It almost sounds like the Jesus seminar today where these people get together and they talk about this and they go into this and they go into that and they vote somebody out and they come up with this false doctrine. Yeah, essentially you're just getting a bunch of people together and without having the standard of God's Word, and without having a consistent understanding of here's how we understand God's Word, it's groupthink. So different traditions began to develop. between the Roman Catholic Church and these various Orthodox churches as time went on. Ultimately, after these councils, you began to have greater and greater differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches.

However, they maintain some things the same, and that is an elevation of Mary, her status being greater. With Mary, here's the way it works. Both the Orthodox Churches and the Roman Catholic Church have Mary as Ever-Virgin. And Christ's death on the cross was retroactively applied to Mary at her conception, so that she was conceived perfectly. So you'll find commonality like that. The Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church have a different apocrypha. the additional books beyond the Scripture, but they don't put the emphasis on Scripture anyway. A lot of the Catholic churches will ignore Scripture.

Some of them will even talk badly about Scripture, just try to undermine confidence in it. And a discussion I had this week with a friend of mine who was talking to a very Catholic friend of his The Scripture is looked at through the eyes of tradition. And so even when you do read Scripture, instead of saying, Scripture is the measure, it's tradition is really the measure of how I look at Scripture. And that's kind of a different thing for us to wrap our minds around. So you'll have a discussion with someone who's steeped in Catholicism or steeped in Orthodoxy, And their traditions are the means through which they look at scripture. They don't look at scripture to measure the traditions, it's the other way around. They look at their traditions, and the Orthodox Church is as much with these icons. Their theology is not, here's what scripture says, their theology is, here's what the icon tells me.

These points of history have been given in part to show that, until the great schism of 1054, there was a great deal in common between what the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Bishop of Rome, and the Eastern Churches, known as the Orthodox Churches, headed by a confederation of bishops, with a few bishops having highest honour among them, and the Bishop of Constantinople being having the highest honours among the Eastern Churches. So those are the major bishoprics. But the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches have both common characteristics and differences today because of their course of history from those earliest centuries into the most recent centuries. One of the other things that continued on is that the Bishops also had political power, a great deal of political power, and both the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church maintained that political power alliance.

Here's an example. I was over in Germany some years ago doing business over there, and we were in this town called Bamberg, And the people in the town wanted to have a city hall. And the bishop, they had to get permission from the bishop to build the city hall. Well, the bishop kept turning them down. And they were persistent and kept coming back to the bishop. And so the bishop said, all right, you can build it in the middle of the river. And so they did. That's what they did.

And you go there, and there's this nice stone bridge coming from each side, and you go past the city hall that they built in the middle of the river, because that's where the bishop said it could go. The bishop was thinking, well, they'll never build it in the river, but that's where he gave permission, so that's what they did.

So political power was a big thing, and that continued into Europe into about the early 1800s where there's alliance between some particular religion and even when the Bolsheviks revolted against the Tsar in Russia, the Tsar was one who was in alliance with and supportive of the Russian Orthodox Church. So the political-military alliance with the churches was something that was carried on even into the Reformation and afterwards. The above patterns, in combination with the varying and shifting pressures from Islam beginning in the 7th century, contributed towards a more distributed authority and leadership structure. Ultimately, the confederation of bishops in the Eastern Church changed into churches with often regional and ethnic names, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, and Tychean Orthodox, et cetera.

And so the ability to add new traditions, thereby supplementing or even overriding the authority of scripture in both the Latin Church and Eastern Churches was and is mitigated by the maintenance of existing traditions and the general reluctance to change. Tradition, right? Tradition. The direct meaning of scripture was and is not the basis of authority for either Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches, but rather the tradition through which the scripture is viewed and supplemented. So rather than saying, here's what scripture says, and then measuring the traditions by that, they would have the traditions and they would interpret scripture through those traditions.

So, for example, we would say, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, right? And so the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches will apply that to Mary. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed Mary with every, you know, spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

So the tradition then is laid on top of scripture rather than saying what does scripture say and let's judge our traditions. So there's one reason why having a conversation with someone of that background is difficult because they're not using the same principles of interpretation at all. We have a mindset of let's look at the Bible and measure everything else by it. But they have a mindset of let's look at the tradition and measure scripture by it, interpret scripture accordingly.

We look and it says that there's one mediator between God and man. And it says Jesus Christ. And we're done, right? Except that there's another one, Mary, who's a mediator between God and man. And by the way, he got all these other saints. Yeah? You had your hand up? Yeah, it sounds like the same thing the Jews were doing when Jesus was here. Adding traditions, and making those traditions then the standard. And then judging Jesus based on the traditions, not on what was originally written. Same problem. Exact same problem.

When did they set up the Pope? The Pope actually, initially, Clement was the first Bishop of Rome, completely unbiblical. They should have rebuked him and run him out of town. Instead, he established the standard that ultimately ended up becoming the Pope. Having the role and title of the Pope started about with Gregory, not so great, but about 590 to 680, Now that doesn't mean we're done, because if you look at the front page there, all these other things were added on centuries later. But having the role and title of Pope in quite that fashion was about 590 or 600 in that time, with Gregory the They're not so great. Yes? At times there was as many as three popes.

So again, a big tug of war over which one's the real one. You have another quandary because you have loss of salvation teaching, because you have the idea of loss of salvation, the Pope who can speak ex cathedra, that is, what he says is taken as inspired, he could say something that's inspired, commit a mortal sin five minutes later, and if he died without being re-saved, he could go to hell, and spend eternity in hell. So it's a strange set of combinations, and you could have Popes that were really awful, And there were some. They were just horrid. Yeah. You had said that previously about the pope being able to speak. Right. Ex cathedra. Ex cathedra. Yep. It's a Latin term.

And then I saw online, on Facebook of all places of course, how the current pope has said that our current idea of God is like antiquated or out of date or something and he's implying to me, I don't know whether or not he actually said that, that we need a whole new idea of God, which seems to line up with the end times as far as what people are going to think and what they're going to believe about God. Yeah, and that's a part of the difficulty is you can have some, you know, why do we need a whole new idea of God? Wow. So all the other popes were wrong? That's really strange. But that's the conundrum that you can get into when you have a guy who's able to speak ex-cathedra and just pronounce things. The current pope is a socialist, is an evolutionist. It's just really kind of stunning.

And he goes around trying to influence things in the world, which is not what you see the Apostles doing. The Apostles don't go around trying to socio-politically influence things. They focus on, you know, we preach Christ and Christ crucified, right? And they focus on the things that are matters of importance and concern as expressed in Scripture. going about just trying to make more of this and less of that, and solve social ills, things of that sort.

But yeah, it's a problem because I have this guy that's inspired, but he can set aside what everybody else has had in prior times. And so the church can really morph depending on what the Pope says. Let's take a look at page 4, which shows you a diagram of some of the different Orthodox churches, and it extends all the way from the Middle East up into Europe and even into Northern Europe. Even an Orthodox church out of Constantinople that goes up to Finland, up into Canada. So lots of different splinter groups. And then the ones, for example, in Russian Orthodox, that has gone as Royalist pointing out into the Aleutians, it's gone into Japan, into the United States, even into China. So these are some of the major Orthodox groups and what's interesting is that the Bishop of Constantinople is the one who has primacy there.

However, the heads of some of these other churches will sometimes take on the title of Pope. So, yeah, it's really puzzling. So they have kind of a ranked standing among them. Let's take a look at something else, and that is, in your last page, we've got a chart there that does some comparison between the Eastern Church and the Western Church.

So the Eastern Church was essentially, over initially, the Byzantine Empire, this was the successor political-military alliance and structure in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and then the western part is where the Bishop of Rome held primacy. Then the claims of papacy Claims of papacy that patriarch of Constantinople is considered second in primacy to the Bishop of Rome. And once the breakup occurred, then they take the primacy. The Bishop of Rome claimed supremacy over the entire church, and therefore the conflict. This is theological development stagnated after the Council of Chalcedon, and we saw that on the But the Roman Church, and as Gail pointed out, continued to change and grow through controversies and expansion.

So of a different character, everything has stayed very much according to traditions and nothing changes very fast in the Orthodox Churches. Catholic Church, however, a different situation. What are some of the changes, for example, that have happened in the Catholic Church, say, during the last 50 some odd years?

Services are no longer in Latin. That's right. And that's one of the things that was a radical change. You asked earlier about the availability of scripture and one of the difficulties is a lot of the availability was Latin. So if you didn't understand Latin, it wasn't making much sense to you.

You know, the Catholic Church teaches, for example, that the elements of the Lord's table become the body and blood of Christ. And so the priest will say, hic est corpus, this is the body, which gets morphed into hocus pocus. Another big change is that they allow parishioners to distribute all the Eucharists. So the parishioners get to do that. So that's another big change. Anything else? Yes.

In Guatemala we ran across the liberal Catholics marrying and the more radical Catholics the unjustified remains. So you had both going on simultaneously. in the name of the Catholic Church and the marriages were also in the name of the Catholic Church. They didn't talk to each other very well. One thing is when we say the Catholic Church and you have this Pope over on top of everything, there are lots of regional differences and a whole spectrum of different viewpoints. When the Communists came into Oklahoma, they loved the Protestants because they didn't try to dominate the government. And therefore there was an unlimited in the Constitution license for them to take any individual trial. And so that goes on today. You can't change it without changing the Constitution.

In the same way that Catholicism adopted a lot of the pagan religious symbols and practices and rituals. In the same way that Catholicism did that, Catholicism also has a tendency to adapt itself to local culture and religion. Yes, and so things get adapted to the local culture far more easily rather than saying this is scripture, this is what scripture teaches, this is the absolute truth and we can count on it. Instead there is this tendency to adapt to various elements of the local culture.

Then one of the other things that you see, too, you have the Greek language cultural background and the Eastern Mediterranean cultural background. And then that's what the Orthodox Church is. With the Latin churches, which is in the West, where you had Roman Catholicism, you had cultural differences that kind of kept them from communicating real well. We're coming from a different language background. We're coming from a different cultural background. And as things kind of broke apart, we're coming also from a different political background. Another thing that came up is that the lower clergy, so you've got ranking of clergy. The lower clergy in orthodoxy is permitted to marry, but not the upper level ones. You can't get married. Forbidding marriage is called what?

1 Timothy 4.1? Doctrines of Demons? This is evil. This is evil stuff.

All clergy were required to be celibate. Another thing is that the constant pressure of Islam in the Orthodox churches was another thing that impacted them. It ultimately was one of the causes for the Crusades. Here the bishops in the East actually asked the Bishop of Rome for help battling these Muslims.

So the tradition is now that you'll have the Pope heading things up and he is changing things. He is coming in with more changes. We've seen some changes in the Roman Catholic Church in the last half century, but probably with this guy even more are likely to take place. It will be interesting to see over time how this gay marriage and all that gets dealt with. Because again, they have the ability to speak ex-cathedra and change what has been tradition. So this used to be what we do, now here's what we're doing.

So there's on the one hand kind of a reluctance to change, but there's also the built in ability to change, and especially if the Pope is leading that. Alright, other thoughts, comments, questions? Yeah? So actually if you look at it, the bottom line is still money.

Because if they adapt themselves to the culture and aren't that concerned about doctrine, then being liked or being so you fit in, so that you get the money, so it goes to the bigger church or whatever, which is really no different, like I was saying a couple of weeks ago, like Laurie said today, than the Jewish religion. That's what Jesus got upset about, going through the temple, was it not? Essentially, if you look at it, tradition was the problem. Tradition was the problem, and Jesus addressed it, and so what happens is that the Catholic and the Orthodox churches anathematize the Jews and then do the same thing all over again by adding their traditions that end up messing up what God originally revealed. Plus what he said about the money changers. Yep. I mean, they were making a profit in his father's house. Right. Yeah.

And so what was his reaction? More than once he cleansed the temple, shoving out the money changers and the animals and driving them all off. It was a problem, and now that's become a problem with those churches, particularly the church at Rome that actually has the Vatican Bank. It's a real serious problem. Other thoughts, comments, questions? Okay, that's great.

Lord, we do thank you for your word that, as we look at these things, we've kind of taken a walk through church history, looking at, comparing the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, but we do thank you that these things are settled in your word, you have a purpose in your word that you've laid out, and rather than having things morphing according to politics and economics and things of that sort, We can stand solidly on what you've revealed. And that you've given it to us because you love us and care for us. And we just thank you for your revelation. We thank you for the gracious gift of your son. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.