Can you hear me okay, Tom? Can you hear me okay? How's that? Loud enough? All right, good morning everybody. Let's pray together and then we're gonna jump back into church history this morning. So let's pray. Father, thank you for the Lord's day. Lord, we bow before you and pray that you'd give us humble hearts. Pray that you'd give us hungry hearts for your word. Lord, we pray that you'd forgive us for our sins. Again, as we wake up afresh on this new morning. We are reminded afresh of our remaining corruption and thus reminded afresh of our remaining need for your mercies that are made new to us. And Lord, we pray. that you would grant us hearts that are at peace, hearts that are freed from the worries and cares and anxieties of the world, and Lord, that we would give you this day our attention and our focus, and that Lord, by your grace, you would condescend and bless your people. Lord, strengthen your church today. We pray that you would bring us visitors, that you would bring those who do not know Christ into our midst to hear the preaching of your word. And Lord, we pray that you would bring your word to their hearts by your spirit. Lord, we pray that you would awaken them from a state of sin and bring them into a state of grace in Christ by your spirit. Lord, glorify yourself. Help us as we again jump into our church history. Lord, pray that you'd give us hearts that are thankful for your providence, and that recognize your kind and gracious hand in upholding your church all throughout the centuries. Lord, we thank you for your grace to us, and we pray that you would glorify yourself this morning. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right, everybody. Good to see you all. We're gonna jump back in. I apologize, there's no outline this morning. I'm finding it, I think church history out of all the courses that I've taught through church history has been the most difficult to actually make outlines for because there's just so much that goes into it. And what do you put in, what do you leave out? Especially when we start doing stuff like what we're gonna do this morning. And we're gonna take a look at the letter to Diognetus. How many of us have ever heard of the letter to Diognetus? Some of us, a few. By and large, when you look at the early church fathers, the writings of the early church, by and large they are written by the apostolic fathers. They're concerned with establishing the faith and the discipline of particular churches. In other words, their writings are more geared towards writing to Christians, those who are already in the faith. And after 150 A.D. though, so again, As we jump into church history, you've got to get that world timeline kind of in your head. Jesus, His ministry comes to an apex somewhere around 30 AD. So we look forward about 120 years after that, we're at 150 AD. All of a sudden there's a shift in the second century in the orientation of Christian literature. And now there's a significant stress on what we call apologetics. Probably most of us in this room are familiar with that word. That is a presentation of reasons for holding to the Christian faith, an attempt to answer questions and challenges that come against the Christian faith from unbelievers, and also to go after positively the error and the falsehood of other religious views and world views. This period, these men who are writing are known as the apologists. Probably, how many of us have heard of the apologists? Yeah, I figured more of us probably than would be familiar with the letter to Diognetus. And something that was really helpful for me in seminary, really exciting to me, actually gave me a hunger for church history more than I had had, Church history, for me, honestly, early on, when I was a Christian, started reading, was a very dry subject, probably because of the particular books that I chose to pick up, that it was just fact after fact after fact, and date and date, and this name, and, you know. Kind of just a broad overview, rather than actually delving into the significance of these things. Something that was really exciting for me was actually delving into the writings of these men firsthand. We have the writings of many of these apologists. And so sometimes when you read church history, you kind of just get a paragraph for each major figure, right? And you get, you know, the date he was born, if we know, the date he died, kind of what he was known for, and then you move on to the next one. It's really, really exciting and beneficial when you actually jump into reading the things that they wrote, the things that they were wrestling with. Because honestly, how many of us, I mean, you don't have to raise your hand, but how many of us know much about the early Church Fathers? I mean, honestly, if we were to give you a pen and a piece of paper, how many of them could we write down? How many of them could we even pinpoint what century they lived in, let alone what they were known for, what they wrote? The early Church Fathers is a time period, I think, that's very anemic for Christians in our day. Even speaking for myself, I know much more about, you know, say the Reformation and the figures that are involved in that and the Puritans that flow out of that. And even in those areas, my knowledge is a very limited knowledge. But even compared to that, my knowledge of the Fathers is not nearly as thorough. And yet, these are the titans who are laying the groundwork for the rest of the Church as they're going to build upon these men's writings and their understanding of the Scriptures. And so, it's exciting when you get into them and interact with their perspective. The letter to Diognetus That's how you say it. I think Diognetus is a spirited, stirring defense of the truth of the Christian worldview, and it is one of the most attractive of all the 2nd century apologies that we have. One scholar said that it is a... It's the pearl of early Christian apologetics. And as you read it, and you can, I almost wanted to assign it, I'll just encourage, if you have time this week, you can go on Google and look up and read the letter to Diomedes. I think it's 10 chapters. It's not super short, but it's not super long. It's not like a whole book or anything. And it comes, as you read it, from a man who is joyfully filled with the joy of faith in Christ, salvation from sin, who stands in awe at the revelation of God, that God has revealed Himself to himself as a sinner, and he's making a passionate plea with an unbelieving Roman pagan by the name of Diognetus, pleading with him to make a similar commitment to trust Christ, to become a Christian. Now, in terms of what we know about this letter, we don't know a ton. We don't know who wrote this treatise, and it really is more of a treatise than it is a letter. By the way, the letter of Diognetus doesn't mean Diognetus wrote it. Diognetus is the gentleman that it's being written to. So the author remains nameless, as many in church history do. We do know whoever wrote it was very highly educated. It's written in very, very good Greek. Our Greek class reconvened yesterday after, I don't know, a couple month break. I think the holidays kind of got in the middle of things. And all of us were a bit rusty. And one of the things that you can always do to test whether you're really grasping Greek or not, and this applies to any language you're working, when you're translating the Bible, Chances are you already know in English. We've run into this in our class. You already know in English. Once you see a particular word like, oh, oh, your memory kicks in, okay, this is John 5 or whatever. And it's hard to tell, okay, am I able to translate this because it's my Greek kicking in or is it because I just already had that memorized and now my English is helping my Greek? One of the ways to really test that is to get outside of the New Testament and, for instance, try to read the letter to Diognetus and see how well you do. It will challenge you. One historian said that the author was a Christian of cultured mind with classical training who was possessed of considerable literary skills and style. That's what we know about the author. He was obviously well-educated. We don't know much about the recipient, Diognetus. We don't know who this is. Some have speculated that it was one of the tutors of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Whether that's true, we're not positive. In terms of location, we know that it was written somewhere in the Roman Empire, probably in the eastern part. But again, its exact location is unknown. One thing we do know is we have an idea of its date. There's evidence within the text itself that tells us it's probably written within the last quarter of the second century. So probably around 180, somewhere around there, 180, 185. So very early apologetic. Now, before we jump into it, and we're gonna, I think, be here a couple weeks, we won't get through the whole letter this morning, but before we jump into it, it's very, very fascinating to hear the story of how we have actually come to possess the letter to Diognetus. We owe our knowledge to the fact that we even know of such a thing called the letter to Diognetus. We owe that knowledge to a single text that was discovered in the 13th or 14th century by a man in Constantinople in 1436. He was an Italian scholar named Thomas of Arezzo, and he happened upon this manuscript in a fish shop where it lay under a pile. It was basically wrapping paper for fish. And he went into this to buy fish. That's what you did in those days. You didn't have all these nice plastic sealers or whatever. He bought some fish, they wrapped it up, took it home, starts unwrapping it, realizes this is a manuscript. And he goes back and he says, do you have any more of these? And sure enough, they did. And that's how we have the letter to Diognetus. And I mean, there's little doubt that had this man not discovered this and gone back, it would have just been used to wrap up some fish thrown into the fire later. One very interesting thing also is that we do have three major gaps in the text as we have it. Chapter 7, chapter 10, there's two in chapter 10. And apparently when this treatise was discovered, portions of the manuscript had been gnawed away by mice. And so we just don't have those portions. The last of those gaps is the most significant because it's the very end of the letter. So we don't actually know how it ended, how he closed off his greetings or anything like that. Thankfully, this manuscript, this one manuscript that was discovered in this fish shop was copied three or four times, three or four other copies were made and distributed, and thankfully so because the original one that was discovered was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War. Basically, a shell hit the library. whole thing just burns to the ground. And so had this not been translated and dispersed, again, we would have lost the letter to Dionysus. So it comes to us through very tenuous circumstances, you might say. And it's fascinating. In history, you discover that many of our documents that we have from antiquity come to us in very similarly tenuous circumstances. Almost all, maybe all, of our old works from antiquity come to us on the basis of just a handful of manuscripts. It's amazing that some of these things even exist. Usually these manuscripts are copies that were copied more than a thousand years after the original was written. There's only one exception to that. Anyone know what historical document is an exception to that rule? The New Testament, we have 6,000 documents, 6,000 manuscripts with portions of the New Testament. And it's amazing if you think about it, if historians treated the other works of antiquity the way that unbelieving and liberal scholars treat the Bible. You hear that often, we can't trust the Bible, it's written by men. Well, if you want to be consistent with that, then you have to throw out everything else we know about antiquity. You have to throw out Homer. We can't know anything, because those come to us, what, on five manuscripts, maybe? And, you know, there's a reason for that, obviously. The Bible calls it sin, right? It doesn't have eternal consequences if you don't believe Homer. But the Bible does say that it has eternal consequences if you don't believe the Bible. So, that's something of how we got the letter. Very fascinating. Let me jump in. And we'll just kind of work our way through and I'm not sure exactly where we'll pause this morning, but we'll pick up next time. The introduction in the first chapter, again, I wish that you could have it in front of you, you could follow through with me, but it's too much to print, so. Again, look it up on Google. I'm sure some of you have it on your phones already right now. In the first chapter of the treatise, the author notes that Diognetus is interested in learning about the Christian faith. In fact, Diognetus has three questions in particular that he wants answered. I'll read you. This is the beginning of the letter. He says, I have noticed, most excellent Diognetus, the deep interest you have been showing in Christianity and the close and careful inquiries you have been making about it. Okay, that's significant. Very, very likely these gentlemen have had conversation before. This is not just the first time that, you know, they're having discourse with one another. There's a relationship that has gone on here. I think that explains, there are some portions of the letter where the author is just scathing in terms of his critique of the Greek and Roman gods. We'll see that a bit here this morning. And, you know, some people might read that and think that's probably not the way I would go after evangelism, you know, the first time talking to someone. But there was clearly a relationship here, and so Diognetus is inquiring of three things, and this is, again, to quote from the author, he says, You would like, this first question sounds like many questions in English, in Greek it's just one big long question. He says, you would like to know what God Christians believe in and what sort of worship they practice which enables them to set so little store on this world and even to make light of death itself. Since they reject the deities revered by the Greeks, no less than they disclaim the superstitions of the professed Jews." Okay, so that's the first question. I'll make comment in a second. The second question, he says, you are curious also about the warm fraternal affection that they all feel for one another. So that's the second question. And then thirdly, he says, also you are puzzled as to why this new race of men or at least this novel manner of life has only come into our lives recently instead of much earlier. So let me summarize those questions, okay? The first inquiry Diognetus has is basically, who is this Christian God? And this question is rooted, remember we've talked about this, in the fact that the Greeks and the Romans accused the early church of being what? Anyone remember? They're atheists, right? They were called atheists. Why? Because they refused to acknowledge and worship the Greek and the Roman gods. And so he wants to know who is this god you worship such that you don't worship the Greek and the Roman gods and such that you're not Jews. So for Diognetus, he's confused by that. You're either a Roman bowing down to these thousands of gods, or you're a Jew, right? You're an atheist. And he's noticed there's a distinction here from Christians and Jews. And so he wants to know what's going on here. And also, attached to that question, he says, also, such that you're not afraid to die. It's an amazing testimony. Remember, we've talked about the early church being a suffering church, a martyred church. That didn't just happen in a corner. We looked at Polycarp's martyrdom, I think, last time. And you remember the amazing testimony of his faith and his courage in the face of death, and didn't fear the lions, didn't fear the flames, didn't need to be chained down so that he didn't run away, but he endured it willingly. Well, that caught the eye of the unbelieving culture. And he's asking this question, what is this God that you worship that enables you even to make light of death? and stare death in the face and not fear it. So that's the first question. The second question is, why do Christians love each other the way they do? And I think that's an especially noteworthy question. Again, thinking of apologetics, wouldn't you love for these kinds of questions to become your way as a Christian? Many pagans were struck by the way that the ancient church loved one another. It was a community of love and care, something very different from their own social relationships. I think it's good for us to reflect on, has anyone ever asked us that? In terms of a defense of the faith. I think perhaps in the reformed community especially, we have a large, and rightfully so, an emphasis on truth. Accurate doctrine, rightly dividing the word of God. Truth is the foundation of love, but truth needs to bear practical and tangible fruit in love. That's what Jesus said, this is how all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. And that was very real to Diognetus. He saw that and he wants to know how is that. And the final question has its basis in the Roman reverence for antiquity. This is very, very interesting. For Romans, if something was gonna be true, it had to be ancient. It had to go back a long ways. If it was recent, it was suspect. And so he's asking, if Christianity is true, why have we, the Romans, the Greeks, not ever known about it? Why have we never discovered it before? That posed a major stumbling block for the acceptance of its truth claims. And that's very fascinating, again, when you think of just how seasons change. You think of our day, and that's almost exactly the opposite. If anything is old in our day, we don't want it. Our technology leads us that way. Who wants Windows 95 today? Who would pick that over a computer that's got Windows 10? Who wants DDR1 RAM when you've got DDR4 or whatever right now? Our technology just leads us to always kind of be, you know, hungering and sniffing after what's new, what's better, what's progressive, right? And in fact, if anything is old, you know, forget it, right? 1689 London Baptist Confession, forget that. You know, Letter to Diognetus, why would we want to look into that? Anyway, in many ways, our culture is like the Athenians in the book of Acts. Paul says that they were always, you know, always searching out something new, right? They were always gathering to talk about something new. In many ways, that's our culture. So, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's fascinating. I'll say this too before we continue on here. The final sentence of the opening section of his treatise, he says this, okay, and think about this as an apologetic. He says, I pray to God the author of both our speech and our hearing, to grant me such use of my tongue that you may derive the fullest benefit from listening to me, and to you such use of your ears that I may have no cause to regret having spoken. That is nothing less than a prayer for Diognetus' conversion. In other words, the author here is a presuppositionalist in his apologetics. He clearly assumes that the embrace of Christian truth is not something that's just going to come from reason alone, unaided human reason. If I can just speak clearly enough, if I can articulate it well enough, you're gonna be converted. No, he says, I bow my knees and I pray to the God who gives ears the ability to hear, who gives my speech the ability to actually communicate truth. I appeal to him that you Diomedes would come and bow and embrace Christian truth. That's key. Again, that's one of the reasons I think this is just a pearl and a gem of early apologetics. They understood apologetics is intimately linked with prayer. If we are engaging in debate, in whatever you want to call it, defense of the faith. And we're not mingling it with prayer. We're not genuinely praying for eyes to be open, for ears to hear the truth of God's word. We're really missing a key part. And he models that for us here. So, three questions. What is the God you worship? Why do you love the way you do? And why has Christianity not come sooner than it has? If you read the letter, he doesn't just, you know, boom, boom, boom, one, two, three, answer them all in a row, and they're tight little neat things. He kind of goes back and forth, but he is basically jumping in and out of these three questions. So the first three sections of the letter answer the first question. How is it that you reject the Greek Roman gods, and yet also you're not a Jew, okay? And after the opening chapter, it contains a vigorous attack on the Greco-Roman paganism and Judaism. The former argument, talking about Roman gods, engages the folly of worshiping products of human imagination, human technology, and it's particularly instructive, I think, about the way that the early apologists, the second century church, defended its monotheistic faith against a pluralistic culture. And the way he goes about this, it's not like Diognetus, you could almost read Diognetus not knowing what you're reading and think you're reading Isaiah, or you could think you're reading parts of Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophets, because he's basically adopted their apologetic in terms of the foolishness of idolatry, fashioning of idols, things like that in the Old Testament. Given such clear reliance upon Jewish monotheistic, you know, rebuttals against idolatry, it's striking that later on he's going to have nothing good to say about Judaism, okay? And we'll get to that here in just a moment. But it's fascinating, and I'll mention this, I've mentioned you learn both good and bad, right? You see where, okay, they saw something good here, but they didn't quite see this, and they didn't nuance it, they didn't balance it, and so it gets him into trouble later. But nonetheless, he goes after First of all, the Greek and the Roman gods and the foolishness of idolatry. And again, we've talked about this, Greeks and Romans were unashamedly polytheistic. That wasn't something that they hid. Their universe was populated with innumerable gods and divine spirits, forests and fields, homes, places of employment. Earth, sky, water, they were all thought to be filled with these beings, these gods. The Apostle Paul alludes to that. If you're familiar with 1 Corinthians 8, a key chapter in terms of, remember, food being offered to idols, Christians are struggling, can I eat it? that whole discussion. And he states there that basically he's talking about the culture. He says that they say that there are many gods and many lords in heaven and on earth. But then the apostle goes on and he says, no matter what his Greek and Roman contemporaries might believe, he says that they were assured as Christians that there is one God, the Father, and one Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, for Paul, these other gods don't exist, right? As for Greek and Roman gods, the ancient church recognized that they were, in Paul's words, quote, nothing in the world. That's what Paul calls them in 1 Corinthians 8. They are nothing in the world. Undoubtedly, they existed in the minds of the ones who were worshiping them and thinking they were offering worship. But from the standpoint of reality, God is God. He's the true God. There is none like Him. He created the heavens and the earth. And therefore, all these other false made-up gods are just that. They are made up. exist. They are something shaped by art, man's own devising. So, drawing upon that monotheistic foundation, the author here seeks to show Diognetus that the gods and the goddesses that they worship are nothing more than the products of human technology. Now, I'm going to read you a section here, so follow along. This is taken from the letter He says to Diognetus, he says, take a good look. And he says, not just with your eyes, but with your intelligence. So he's leveling, if you will, with Diognetus of seriously just stop for a moment and think about what you guys do in terms of your worship of the Greek gods. He says, take a good look. "...at the forms and the substances of those objects which you call gods and hold to be divine." And then he goes through a litany of examples. He says, "...is this one here, for instance, anything other than a block of stone, identical with the kind of flagstones that we tread under our feet?" Is not that one there made out of brass of no finer quality than the common utensils that are manufactured for our everyday use? A third wood already rotting in decay, a fourth of silver needing someone to keep an eye on it all the time for fear of thieves, a fifth made of iron pitted all over with rust, and a sixth of no better looking earthenware than the articles they turn out for the humblest domestic purposes. He says this, is not every single one of these made of materials that are perishable? Was not one made by the stone cutter, another by the brass founder, a third by the silversmith, a fourth by a potter, and up to the moment when the skill of those craftsmen gave them their present forms, was it not just as practical, indeed is it not just as practical even now, for every one of them to have been made into something different? In other words, are they not, one and all, nothing but dumb, blind, lifeless things, without sense, without movement, rotting and decaying? Now, who does that sound like? Does that ring any Old Testament bells to you? Sounds very much like Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 40. If you're not familiar with Isaiah 40, read chapter 40 later on. He says, he goes on, he says, do you really call these things God and really do service to them? Yes, indeed you do. You worship them and you end up by becoming like them. Is it not because we Christians refuse to acknowledge their divinity that you dislike us so? And so you understand his argument, I hope, right? You see this idol in one of their yards made of stone. And he's saying the guy who made that, the stone cutter, up until the very moment he decided to make it into that shape, the other half of that block he probably just threw off and he made it a paver to walk on through his garden, right? They come from the same place. They're man-made. They come from our imaginations. And he says, are you really accusing us of being dishonorable to them by rejecting them or is it not indeed you who are offending them by treating them in such a base way? And so he's pointing out the foolishness of their idolatry. He says, he goes on, he says, it is surely a mockery and an affront to them that so long as these venerated deities are, listen to this, there's almost humor here and kind of, you know, he's poking Diognetus. Is it not a mockery and an affront to them that as long as these venerated deities are only made of stone or pottery, you leave them quite unprotected, right? So if you've got an idol made of stone, leave it out in the yard, no one's gonna take that, right? But when they are silver or gold, Then you lock them up every night and you post watchmen over them all the day in case they might be stolen." And he says, if they are indeed really endowed with sense, the sort of honors that you pay to them must be more of a humiliation than a tribute. And if they're not, then you're making nonsense of them when you adore them with the blood and the fat of your sacrifices. And he goes on and he says much more, but you kind of catch the flavor of how he's pointing out the foolishness and the mockery, right? I mean, if you have to bring your God in from outside every day and post, you know, put him in your safe or whatever so that someone doesn't break in and steal him, what does that say about your God? It says that he's made by man, he's protected by man, he's not much of a god, right, and thus not very worthy of sacrifice and honor and worship. And let me just close off this section by pointing this out. He closes this section, he says much more about the foolishness of their idolatry, but he closes off this section with his final comment. He says Christians are not in bondage to such gods. Now to understand the thrust of that comment, you need to bear in mind the Apostle Paul's discussion in 1 Corinthians 8. That's a key section for your study. As I mentioned earlier, Paul maintained that all of the so-called Greek, Roman gods, the lords, they had no objective reality, right? From the standpoint of reality, they don't exist. And yet, if you read 1 Corinthians 8, he went on to argue that just because they don't exist, that doesn't mean that pagan religion is harmless. And if you're familiar with the passage, you know what I'm referring to. In fact, he says that to worship such gods, as the epistle goes on a couple chapters later in 1 Corinthians 10, 19, and 20, he says that it is in fact fellowship with demons. In other words, these demonic powers, Paul's view, this is key for us I think in apologetics, when we're dealing with the cults, when we're dealing with those who are involved in cultic practices, false religion, false worship, Paul's view of that is not simply, well those gods don't exist. That's true, those gods don't exist. His view is also, and that's demonically influenced and led. And that's a very key thing for us to understand. In other words, conversion to Christianity not only meant coming to the realization that the Greco-Roman gods was a grand illusion, but it also spelled freedom from the tyranny of numerous demonic powers. That's very important when we come face-to-face with false religion. Idolatry is rooted in demonic worship and demonic activity, whether or not they are aware of that. We need to not be ignorant in terms of the work of Satan in the world, and we usually think of, well, you know, the work of demons is just the really scary stuff we think of in Halloween, right, and scary masks and things like that. That's not typically how demonic activity works, right? Paul describes Satan as an angel of light. And therefore we shouldn't be surprised when his ministers clothe themselves as ministers of light as well. Don't be fooled. False teaching is demonic underneath in terms of who's behind it. God certainly is not behind it. And so... That section closes with this statement, we're not in bondage to such things. In other words, the gospel brings freedom from idolatry. That becomes a major point in early Christian apologetics, that Christianity brings freedom into the worship of the true and the living God and delivers us from the bondage of demonic activity in false worship. Now, chapters three and four, I think this is the last section I'll talk about this morning, and we'll pause. Chapters three and four, the author then turns to Judaism, right? We said that that was kind of the question of Diognetus. How is it that you don't worship the Greek and Roman gods, but also you're not Jews? How are you, you know, somehow in between those? He turns to consider Judaism, and this is important. As I already alluded to, this is an area where we learn both, or this is a letter where we learn both good and bad, right, from examples that have gone before us. And it's something very interesting that, unlike the New Testament, right, when you read the New Testament, In terms of its views of the Old Testament, we saw how it very much connects the fulfillment of Christ and the Church in the Old Testament Scriptures, right? There's this organic unity. When you read the letter to Diognetus, he only has contempt for Old Covenant Judaism. We don't have percentages, but there were a lot of Jews who were populating the church, in the early church. There were Jews who had been in Judaism, who had been converted, their eyes are open, and they now have faith in Christ. They see the obsoleteness of the Old Covenant, right? They see how it was typological, it was pointing towards something greater, but they didn't view the Old Testament as though it was something inherently bad, right? There's a key difference there. For instance, I mean, you read the book of Hebrews and it's just all over the place. Nowhere is the author saying that these things which went before were bad, like God made a mistake or something. And the early church participated in the synagogue, right? We talked about that. But... As the church becomes populated and packed with Gentiles, right, which is what happened, right, there's less and less Jews coming to faith in Christ, the Gentiles are swarming into the church. As that begins to happen, some, I think including our author here, in some ways throw the baby out with the bathwater. Beginning in 70 AD, when the temple is destroyed and the church officially has to make a break, there becomes this split between the Christians and the Jews. In fact, in the 90s, so 20 years later, the synagogue actually added a prayer to their liturgy that said, Cursed be the Nazarenes. That would be pretty hard if you were a Christian to continue to participate in synagogue worship, right, when part of the liturgy is, Cursed be the Nazarenes. And this split really kind of came to a head with the Jewish revolt that came in 130 to 135, which finally ejected all Jews from Israel. And that ejection would not be reversed, by the way, until 1948. You know, you think back on the significance of 1948 and why that was such a monumental thing to the Jews. Well, that was the end of almost a 2,000 year exile out of their land. That happened in the 130s. And because of that, there began to be this, on the part of Gentile Christians, some arrogance and failure to see the significance of Old Testament Scriptures, Old Covenant, significance, things like that. So, let me just kind of open this up a little bit. Is the New Testament, I'll ask this question, is the New Testament critical of Old Testament Judaism? I would say the answer to that is both yes and no, okay? Certainly, the New Testament is critical of man-made pharisaical additions that were added to the Old Covenant traditions, right? So, the Pharisees, Jesus goes hard after them because they had built this layer of moss on the roof of the Old Covenant, true Old Covenant spirituality, and they've added all these man-made traditions, and Jesus is going after that and saying, you've replaced the Word of God with the traditions of men, right? So he rips that apart. But the New Testament also recognizes that there were many things in the Old Covenant that while they were abrogated in Christ, they were still commanded by God to his people in that time, right? And they were not inherently bad. That's the distinction that the author to Diognetus doesn't, that's the distinction he fails to make, the nuance he fails to make. And many of the Gentile apologists are beginning to fail to see how important it is that we be grounded in Old Covenant, our understanding of the Old Covenant and Old Covenant Judaism, especially among the Gnostics. Now, our author is by no means a Gnostic, but This is a weak point of the apology. It's a great letter overall, but this is one area where he fails to be rooted in the Old Testament. And here's one other reason it's significant. It's gonna get him in trouble when he goes to try to answer that third question, right? You remember the third question, well, why hasn't Christianity, if it's true, why didn't it come a lot longer, how am I trying to say that? A long time ago. Why did it come so recently on the scene? Diognetus doesn't really have the greatest answer to that. There are many other apologists who have way better answers than Diognetus gives. For instance, what are you talking about? We go way back to Genesis 3, right? This Christian church is not something that's all of a sudden just brand new on the scene. This is something that God promised from Genesis 3 onward. We are the fulfillment of God's promises, the Abrahamic promise fulfilled in Christ and all these things. Diognetus, because of his kind of dismissive view of Old Covenant Judaism, fails to make that distinction, and so he doesn't really have that to grab onto, and it's going to get him into some trouble. So, just for instance, he says, speaking of Jewish food regulations, and the Jews' observance of the Sabbath, and the various seasons of the year that they observed, he said, quote, all these things are ridiculous, and hardly proof of genuine piety. And so you can hear his tone there, just very dismissive. Nonetheless, let me see, Well, you know what, actually, I think I'm going to stop there, because if I start this next paragraph, it's going to get into the next section. We'll save that for next time. But we've got about five minutes here. And so let me pause there. Any questions? Is this, and feel free to be honest, is this very hard to follow without an outline when we talk about these things and you can't read along? This makes it challenging. Diognetus, D-I-O-G-N-E-T-U-S, I think. I have to see it if I write it. I think I spelled it right. Diognetus, yeah. Any questions, comments, anything? I'm just a farmer. Yep, yeah, Justin Martyr. Do you know how he, what he says on these same things? Specifically on that last point? I'm not sure, go ahead. I don't either, I need to pick it up. On which point? Reread Justin Martyr. On the Old Testament. Oh, gotcha. I'd have to read to know exactly where he would land. Don't quote me, but I believe he's actually one who would have a much better answer and that he would direct his readers back to the Old Testament and God's promise beginning in the garden and being caretaker. I think so too. Do you know of anybody else in that same time frame, offhand? Who would be dealing with these things? Any other rider that we have? I'm not sure. Yeah. In terms of just others to compare? Yeah. I'd have to look. I'm sure I've got it in footnotes in terms of interaction with other things. But yeah, I'd have to look. Yeah. Like I say, I think this is an area where we, including myself, we're anemic. Maybe we've read across a brief paragraph or a few pages in a church history book, but in terms of locating where they were, what time they lived, what battles they were fighting, that's something that we would do well to familiarize ourself more with. Gary. You have any recommendations for like dipping your toes in the water for the early church fathers and whatnot? Because obviously just, I know I've jumped in and tried to like read one here or there and it's like, it's difficult. I don't know. Maybe you could look one up or something. I don't know if you know one off the top of your head. So I forgot to mention this. I'm basically using the manuscript from one of my professors from seminary, Michael Haken. He did our course on early church fathers. He has a book. I don't know the title. Type in Michael Haken, H-A-Y-K-I-N, Probably Early Church Fathers. Do you know Thaddeus, if that's what it's called? That's what it's called? Yeah. Reading the Early Church Fathers, I think that's one of the best introductions, because he does this. He jumps into how they helpfully developed things, how they made mistakes, how others corrected. And he teaches it in a way that's very accessible and very you actually are getting into the life, if you will, of the man, things that he went through, why, context that explains why he was leaning the way he would type of thing. So that would be one good one. There's one that I, a church history book that I didn't even realize I had and I found it in my Kindle this week. And it was very helpful. I'm trying to think of, let me see, hang on. The story of Christianity. Anyone read that? Familiar with that? Let's see if I can get to the... I don't know if you say his first name is Justo or Justo, it's with a J. Justo Gonzales. And there's two of them, The Story of Christianity. The first one brings you, I think, through the Reformation, and the second one. But I was reading it and consulting it, and it was very helpful. It was, again, just kind of taking a similar approach of not just memorizing dates and all these things, but actually kind of wrestling with the context of what was going on. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure there are others. Anyone else? We got one minute. Okay, let me close this in prayer. Father, we thank you for your hand of providence. We thank you that you have always had your people, Lord, even as we have considered some of these things and the connection of the Old Testament Scriptures with the New Testament Scriptures and how you have shown us that the truth of Christianity and Christ coming in the church is not something novel, just something brand new that came on the scene but was rather rooted deeply in the Old Testament Scriptures. that indeed Christ has been the focal point of history from the very beginning of creation. And Lord, we pray that you would teach us to understand these things, that we might be equipped to engage with attacks and genuine questions that people bring to us regarding the Christian faith. Lord, I think we all would confess that we have not done as much as we could do in terms of being equipped to give an answer for the hope that lies within us as Peter commands us. And we pray, Lord, you'd help us to slowly but surely begin to grow in our ability to defend the faith, to make a positive argument for the truth of the Scriptures, And Lord, that we might even be able to expose the error and the falsehood and the foolishness of idolatry, even as this author has done. Lord, that you might, through that, bring sinners to a knowledge of the hopelessness of man-made religion, and that they might come and bow before the Scriptures and receive the truth of the gospel as you've given it to us. Lord, help us, we pray. We ask that you'd be with us in corporate worship this morning, Lord. Free our hearts to worship you. We pray that you would, again, deliver us from things that are constantly clamoring for our attention. bringing temptation to anxiety and worrying about the week that lies ahead of us. Lord, grant us to trust that you are the God who takes care of your people, that you are the God in whom we can rest, you are our fortress, and that truly there is nothing better for us than to rest our hearts and our souls this day in your goodness to us. Lord, be with us for your glory, we pray. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.