Well, good morning, everybody. Good morning. Let's pray and then we'll get into the weeds. Our gracious Father, we thank you for bringing us here this morning. We pray, Lord, that you open our minds to hear the truth of your Word. Fill us with your Spirit. Help us to discern what is truth, what is non-truth. We pray, O Lord, that you prepare us for worship. that you fix our eyes upon our Savior, to follow Him with our whole hearts. In His name we pray, amen. Okay, so I gave you, or you got, I didn't give everybody one, papers for today. We're gonna start with finishing up last week. We were talking last week about a man named Origen. Remember, he's the guy who was a brilliant theologian who didn't get anything right. And the reason we were talking about Origen is because his thinking led to a lot of, well, let's put it this way, it led to a lot more thinking within the church. And so the church later had to address heresies that had arisen in response or because of what he taught. He was a very prolific writer. He made the rounds throughout the ancient world from North Africa all the way around the Mediterranean. He spent time in Rome. The man traveled and talked with a lot of different people and wrote a lot of different papers and books, and so his viewpoint got out there. Last week, if you have last weeks, it would be helpful, but you don't have to because we're probably only going to spend about five minutes or so. I'm horrible at telling time, so let me get my clock out. So we ended with talking about Origen's scriptural interpretation, how he had this four-layer allegorical, right? So the first level of reading scripture was the level that we agree with. The plain, literal meaning of the text is the first and most important thing you should see. But then he said, okay, then there was a spiritual level for personal application, and then there was a spiritual level for church application, and then there was a spiritual level for thinking about the second coming of Christ. I'm trying to figure out how to phrase that without word vomit. So, we look at that and we say, okay, there is deeper meanings to scripture sometimes. Really, truly. I mean, Jesus told parables. That's The parable isn't literally, okay, all the Christians are farmers, all pastors are going out to sow seed, or we're all stalks of wheat in a field, right? Clearly, that's an allegory. That is supposed to be interpreted as an allegory, but Origen said that all scripture was that way. I don't remember if we talked about it. We'll go through this last one real quick. Origin had some big deficiencies in thinking about God's revelation through time. So Adam and Eve, how much of the gospel did they know? this much, they knew that their descendant, maybe their first born child, they didn't know their seed was going to crush the head of the serpent. That's the gospel. They knew that was going to happen, that God would save them, right? That's what they knew. You go a few generations down and more and more of the gospel God reveals to people more and more. And then he reveals to Abraham, okay, you're going to have descendants and they're going to be holy seed. Okay. They're going to be my people. More and more and more. Then you have King David. Well, David, from you is gonna come the Messiah, the great King, right? So you have this progressive revelation building. God is telling people more and more throughout the generations. This isn't people just thinking the same thing, straight line. It broadens. We know more and more and more and more of the gospel all the way up until the point of John the Baptist, right? And then he's saying, all right, I'm making the way clear for the Messiah right now, right now. He's coming right behind me. This isn't in the future, right? You have this progressive revelation and then Christ comes. And we have the New Testament written after Christ, right? Origin, it went over his head. He thought, well, how in the world did Abraham have multiple wives when the law of God said you can't? OK, wait. Timeline here. Abraham, Mount Sinai. Which came first? Abraham. So when thinking about the Old Testament law, Origen kind of got his chocolate milk a little over-stirred. He really got lost in that progressive revelation. We have to understand that. When you look at some of the more infamous acts, such as Lot and his incest, we look at that and we say, that was horrible. But it wasn't illegal at the time. Was it still sinful? We would say yes, it was still sinful. So you see, we see it, we look in scripture, we can read it. So Origen did it too, he had a bible, and he read it, a lot. That's one of the ways that we can guard against, we have to understand timeline. This may be a soapbox, but if you have a good study bible, Just a little historical paragraph at the beginning of the book that you're reading The minor prophets all of a sudden the timeline makes sense. You're not like, okay, they're they're all writing it No, you can see some of the minor prophets wrote before the exile of the Babylon some of them wrote after the return and Then you understand their message a little you're like, oh, I totally get why they're saying that now So origin, like I said, his chocolate milk was over stirred Yes one hundred percent and origin He wasn't an ascetic. He wasn't a monk. But he was very much leaning that way. And that's what we're going to look at this morning, in a second, is the asceticism and the hyper-spirituality that kind of flowed from some of his teachings. Real quick on Origen, he had a couple of very famous works. One of them was Contra Celsum. It was written against a letter. So it's against Contra Celsum. Celsus, he was a pagan philosopher named Celsus he wasn't a very good philosopher. He wasn't a very famous philosopher until after he died and then people were like Oh, he's had some nasty things to say about Christianity. So we like him. He attacked Mary Especially her virginity. He said well, there's no way that God would choose Mary because she was of such lowly birth Okay God in the scripture. We see God uses the weak things, right? He attacked Jesus and said he wasn't a miracle worker. He was just a low-level magician Not even a good philosopher, not even a good thinker, not even a good teacher. He was just a low-level magician. Right, that's what Celsus said. And so Origen, point by point, went through a book. He wrote a book. I said, okay, Celsus says this, I'm going to look at scripture and say this. And it was very good. It was very well accepted. It wasn't just origins normal, getting everything wrong. He actually went through and said, this pagan is saying this about our Lord. This is what scripture says. And he countered that, right? So that work was lost, but they've actually been able, scholars have been able to piece it together because it was so quoted by so many other people. throughout the centuries that they were actually able to put the whole book back together, they believe. The other one is On First Principles. It was the first systematic theology that the church ever had. For those of us who just went through Burkhoff's summary, we can appreciate systematic theology. We start at A, B, C, D. It's super helpful. For the record, off on a tangent, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not have a systematic theology. And we'll be getting to them probably after I leave for Uganda, so Elijah will have to finish up those classes on the Eastern Orthodox Church. But on first principles, it was not good theology. Much of what he said, again, was wrong, because the origin was wrong along a lot. But it was a really solid attempt at systematic theology. This is how we understand what scripture says. in light of scripture, but Origen didn't just say, in light of scripture, he said, in light of scripture plus this philosophy, his neoplatonic thought. Okay, so I'm kind of rushing through that. The last couple things about Origen, as I said, he was one of the most important theologians in the early church, even if he was wrong about almost everything. Many of the ideas he held would help give rise to later heresies, such as Arianism, which was a response in part to Origen. We're going to talk about Arianism maybe next week. I said we'd talk about it this week, but sorry, we can't talk about it this week. We've got other ground to cover. And subordinationism. We touched on subordinationism last week. We're talking about the eternal subordination of the sun. which isn't scriptural. Christ is not subordinate in his very godness. He is very God. He is co-equal with the Father. A co-equal is not subordinate, right? But the church didn't have an articulation for that at this point in time, in the mid-third century. So later on, At the Council of Nicaea, the elders and pastors got together and they spent a significant amount of time arguing and reading scripture to come to a good scriptural consensus on it. And that is one of the things that we can thank Origen for, I think, is what he said brought these things to light. The scum floated to the top of the pot and the church had to scrape it off, right? The church was forced to think deeply about doctrines that it had assumed everyone was in agreement, including the Trinity, the nature of the soul, heaven, hell, Christ's humanity, that's a big one, eternity, and the nature of sin. You know, what is sin, right? You ask Paisley, she can give you a good, solid Children's Westminster Catechism answer, right? We can thank this early generation for thinking about that so that later generations can put it into a concise, really, really easy to understand form and we don't have to put on our scholarly hats and argue with each other about it. That's so cool because that's part of my heritage. Yes. So the church did use Origen for several centuries. He was later condemned as a heretic. He was long dead. But even in his lifetime he was a bit bit on the fringe, and people realized it. But most of the time, it was usually long after you were dead before you were contended as a heretic, and that was no exception for Origen. Due to his over-spiritualization, Origen's work strongly influenced later asceticism. Okay, that gives the segue to today's lesson. your paper that says lesson five. If you don't have one, I will make an airplane and throw it to you. Some of them maybe, yes. No, no, I think actually if we look at scripture, Simon Magus was probably the original heretic, but that was kind of a joke, but actually he gets blamed for things. The early church blamed Simon for the book of Acts that tried to buy the Holy Spirit. They actually blamed him for starting several gnostic sects. I actually, I don't know if that's true. A couple thousand years removed, it's hard to say. Yes? Okay, so some good Greek words here. Ascesis, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. If any Greek scholars, please correct me. That is asceticism. looking at, and it means to train, to practice, to exercise. So the ascetics were men who were characterized by rigorous lifestyles, generally, and women, not just men. We're going to get to that. There's two main types. So under 1A, there's cenobitic, comes from the Greek, coin. Oh, beyond. I don't know how to pronounce that. I have it written. You can read it and pronounce it how you like. I mean, that means life in common. Okay. So cenobitic monastics were not actually monks, which comes from the word mono monk. Mono meaning one, they were actually ascetic together. So they were a community of people who lived a rigorous life. And this is not unique to Christianity. We can think of Buddhist monks and Hindus and Sikhs and all kinds of people that practice some sort of communal practice. asceticism. The Cenobites lived in a monastic community that usually followed a rule. I have that quoted. The rule is basically a way to schedule life around prayer, work, study, Sleep. They like to sleep. Some of the ascetics didn't like to sleep. Later, ascetic fathers actually wrote rules that said, no, you need to get at least eight hours. You guys are killing yourselves young because you're sleeping one hour a day and praying for 23, and it's just not good for you. That's not what the Lord wants. The Saint Pacomius is credited as the founder of the Christian Cenobite asceticism. St. Pocomius is known as one of the desert fathers. We're going to touch on them in a minute. And fun fact, you can Google sayings of the desert fathers and find a bunch of their writings that somebody, the early church put into a book for us to read and shocker. It's not full of heresy. Be on your guard. We're talking about people who are ascetics. We're going to be talking about why they were probably wrong in being ascetic. But many of the things they had to say was very good. I mean, these are men and women who devoted their entire life to studying scripture and prayer and mercy. And so they really did have a heart for the Lord. They weren't weird medieval monks, you know, with the scratchy brown robes and the big beer bellies. You know, that was much later. These were actual... Yeah, that's called a tonsure. There was actually almost a schism in the church between the Scottish church and the Roman church over the shape of the tonsure. Elijah will also cover that later after I'm gone. Asceticism means exercise or practice or training to train. The next type of asceticism that is, these are the main types, but there are subcategories, okay, is aromatic. The word is aramos, and it means desert. And that's also where we get the word hermit, okay? Aromatic is where we get the term hermit. St. Anthony of the Desert is credited as the founder of aromatic asceticism. He has a very interesting story, a very noteworthy character, very godly man. He was super wealthy. His parents died suddenly and left him and his little sister without parents and Anthony was at church and heard a sermon on Matthew 19, where Jesus told the rich young man, go sell everything you had. And he goes, oh, I'm rich. So he took it very literally. He sold most of everything he had. Not everything he had, most of everything he had. Him and his sister lived very humbly for a time and then he went back to church and heard another sermon that basically he took away and he said, okay, now I got to sell. I got to sell everything, everything. And so he left his sister, she wasn't a tiny little girl. He left her with some of the women of the church to raise and he walked out into the desert and spent the rest of his life more or less as a hermit. But he, in between being a hermit for something like 15 years alone in a cave, that's cuckoo, he then came out and helped to found basically a cenobitic community. Now, they didn't really talk to each other. So if you had a whole bunch of hermits, aromatics, living near each other, they didn't really interact with each other. They didn't go into town for food, usually. People would bring them food. They were very thin. I mean, if you're relying on people to walk miles into the desert to bring you food, you're not going to be beer bellied. writing done about the people who brought food? Were they happy to do it? Did they think of it as service to God? Or was it just like, ugh, this guy wants more food? The little I've read on that is most of the people who later on would bring food and whatever to these desert dwellers did so in order to talk to them. So they did it willingly. So later on, St. Anthony, he spent about five years in between his hermit days establishing basically a colony of people who devoted themselves basically entirely to the study of Scripture. Now we can see the problems with this. If you have isolated people who are studying Scripture and their personal holiness is wonderful, they are rejecting the world, the flesh, and the devil. in a real tangible way, but are completely apart from the world, not preaching the gospel, not living a Christian life, not evangelizing, you can see where the problem arises. So they were starving in a nonsense way more than just physically. Yes, especially the hermits, they were alone. You have to have iron to sharpen you, otherwise you become a kook and you come up with your own ideas and you end up you know, down the origin track where you come up with a great idea, you're like, I thought of it, it's brilliant, it's, you know, I can use this verse to proof text it, and you're just dead wrong. And some of them ended up that way. It is true. Air medics spent their days alone and are characterized by a complete withdrawal from society. Later on, there are some very interesting characters who spent years sitting on top of stone pillars all by themselves, praying, and people would throw them up food. and bags of water. That kind of isolation also constitutes your ever-loving mind. Yes, yes, it would. It really, really would. So I do suggest if you guys have Google, I didn't print out the sayings of the Desert Fathers because it's like 300 pages long and the church doesn't have that much paper on hand. I've killed plenty of trees already, uh, in this study. So, um, but you can download a PDF. It's very interesting at the, at the very least it's very interesting and worth the read. It's not required reading. Um, but these, these monks, these aromatics, we can call them monks because monos alone monk, that's where it came from. Um, uh, They memorized, many of them, these early ones that were more famous, they memorized huge tracts of Bible. And people would come to them to learn scripture. I mean, they had a really good, solid, biblical heart, if I can put it that way. They wanted to know God through the scriptures. That's what they wanted. But it was an overreaction. We're going to see that in a second. Maybe like 10 seconds. What did they use for reading? Where did they get their stuff? Scrolls. But which scrolls? Yeah, so interesting fact. I had a very cordial argument with a Roman Catholic a while back, and we're talking about biblical authority and inspiration, and he was saying, well, nobody had the Bible back then in the third century. And I said, Yes, they did by the 3rd century. Not everybody had a Bible. Absolutely not. Not everybody did. In fact, most people didn't. But the fact that pastors often did or had large portions of scripture in scrolls in the church, they did have scripture. And what did they do? A man sat down and he copied it. Maybe he made 10 or 20 copies of it. in his lifetime. And you're talking hundreds and hundreds of men sat down and painstakingly, letter by letter, wrote, copied scripture and disseminated it. They had scripture. Not like we do. I don't know how many Bibles you have. I have like five or six and I have four apps on my phone. We're spoiled rotten with the blessing of scripture at this point. Even the scrolls of Dead Sea Scrolls, they hid them beside. Dead Sea Scrolls are interesting. That actually goes back to our very first lesson looking at some of the Jewish sects. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by the Essenes, they believe. They were kind of hermit-type people. They were kind of cenobitic. They were, actually. They were. But they weren't Christian. Let's see here, where was I at? Okay, C. The early monastics are called the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They often lived in caves, abandoned forts, ghost towns. The list includes Pachomius, St. Anthony, Macarius the Egyptian, and Arsenius the Great, and there's dozens of others. Those are the big ones that when you type in the Desert Fathers, they just pop right up. This is an overview, so if you want to get really in-depth, you've got to go do your own homework. I have given you several handouts on it that I found interesting and good. I have read them in their entirety. Again, you have to be careful what you find on the internet, especially on World History Encyclopedia. This was a good article, though. It was a good read, very interesting, informative. This one, I like this one a lot. This one was like 80 pages long, and I only gave you, I think, three pages. Maybe four. History of the Christian Church, Chapter 9, Ascetic Tendencies. Explains a lot. Please, please read it. And then the last page is about Cyprian of Carthage, who we're not at yet. We'll talk about him in a minute. I know, I'm sorry. My phone, I pull it up and I send it to the printer and it spits it out and I don't have any choice of font size. Okay, so D. Centered around Alexandria, Egypt, the Christian ascetic movement spread across the empire even as far as China. There was a Christian monastery, a community in China I believe it was until the 700s when an emperor, I don't remember his name, Chinese emperors, they go over my head, who hated monks of any sort, levied a persecution mostly against Buddhist monks, but the Christian monks, being monks, got wiped out. China, we went to China early on. I mean, you're thinking of the missionary zeal of these Christians was just incredible. I mean, China's a long way away from Egypt. I mean, it's a long way away from here too, but they walked, right? Alexandria, that's important. Alexandria, Egypt. North African Christianity at this point. and for quite a while afterwards was really the home base of Christianity. I mean, you had Christianity all throughout the Mediterranean. Strong presences throughout Palestine and up into modern day Turkey. We've talked a little bit about Turkey. That would be Byzantium, the Byzantine side of Rome. Rome itself, Greece, but North Africa. Historically, looking back at the North African church, they are the strong, muscular, theological, writing, heretic, hunting, heretic producing, Christian church for the first several centuries. They were so Christian. I mean, in North Africa, they were so Christian. There's still a lot of Christians in North Africa. The Muslim invasion, which we won't get to in this series, really, really hurt. But strangely enough, there are still millions of Christians in North Africa. Egypt, Alexandria, was very important. Alexandria is, not just geographically, but in philosophy, in learning. There were schools there. If you wanted to learn something and you were in North Africa, you either went to Carthage or you went to, preferably, Alexandria. And you learned. There were masters of pretty much every philosophy you could think of, and there were a whole lot of Christians. And so if you want... Yes, actually the Coptic church is the Egyptian church, and they are still there. They have not left. There's actually a schism that happens in the 5th century, and the Copts kind of break away. But they're Christians, and they're there. I disagree with them on a whole lot, but they confess Christ, and so I'm not going to argue with them too much. What does Coptic mean? I believe Coptic is the original Egyptian language for Egypt, but I'm not positive on that. I'll look that up for you. It's not in the modern Egyptian language, which is basically a mix-match of Arabic. Just a side note, where's Uganda? Central East Africa. So Lake Africa, so Egypt's way up here, Uganda's like right here. And it's landlocked. It's on the north shore of Lake Victoria. So if I like Victoria, it's on the north end. It's the country that's on the north end. I don't think we made it that far in the third century. But there's Christians there now. So. Lord willing. So letter E on your handout. This ascetic movement, and this is being generous because I think we should be generous in this, and I'll contrast this a little bit with the medieval asceticism. It was in large part a response to the lax and worldly appearance and behavior that many in the church had taken in between persecutions. It really was a reaction to sin and worldliness. If you are living in a pagan world where there is every temptation possible at all times in front of you. It is logical to remove yourself from the situation, isn't it? We would say, yeah, move to the country. Duh, that's why we're in Concho, right? I mean, this really, truly, cities, the more people, because people are sinners, together you have more sin. It really is basic sin math, right? And you're talking in an ancient world where they didn't have this level of morality we did. Yes, they were the Roman Empire, they had Roman law, but you're still talking about paganism, rank paganism. And so, in between persecutions, and we're gonna talk about some of the persecutions in a second, in between some of these severe persecutions, you know, sometimes there'd be 25 to 30 years, most of a generation, without any persecution, real persecution. Now, to understand persecution in this time, it was never global. throughout the empire, like it, like we would like to think it was, it was usually in localized areas until Decius, Emperor Decius and Valerius. We'll talk about them in a minute. But in between these persecutions, you had peace, you had time where you could send your kids to the catechetical school to learn scripture, to be catechized. You know, catechized, catechism, to learn. We catechize our children in this denomination, right? We have, we catechize ourselves. We have the Westminster larger and shorter catechisms, right? But you had schools to send children to, and you could do it without fear that they would be killed on their way to school. You could become, lawyer Christian but the secular and the church kind of started to merge and so you had people who were using church authority in the the civil realm such as you know you were and I don't think that they should be separate don't misunderstand me if you're if you are a judge and you're a Christian you should be a really God-fearing Christian judge but they would use it for gain and so Looking at- It didn't show up until, what, 500? It was late, yes. So we're actually going to- thank you. We're going to talk about the papacy in a minute. And I have a link. I tried to print it, and when I printed it, it cut off half of each ending paragraph. So I'll give you the link at the end of class. I'll write it down. It's on Ligonier.com, by the way, about the rise of the papacy. So, we look at this response. This really was a response. Getting away from sin. It's logical. It's not unscriptural. It was an overreaction. But being celibate and studying scripture is not a sin. If you want to be celibate, you want to have no marriage relationship, you want to devote your life to the scripture, Read 1 Corinthians 7. That is a godly endeavor. That is not sin. But you can't force it on somebody else. You can't say, well you have to be celibate too. Maybe if you're unmarried, maybe you should be. Maybe that is what God is actually calling you to be. To live holy for Him. Right? Right? And Paul also says, he talks a lot about marriage. It's good. Marriage is good. Let's turn in our Bibles real quick. I actually think that Paul was married and his wife died. And I have some evidence for that. It's the language of the Copts, which represents the final stage of ancient Egyptian. It now survives only as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church. Okay, everybody got that? I don't have to talk, okay, good. Okay, all right, so in your Bible, you don't have to turn there if you don't want to, but I'll turn there for you. Genesis chapter one, verse 27. Keep in mind, most of these ascetic folks would not have forced other people to be ascetics. This was their calling, okay? Later on, the church develop doctrine really desiring that their pastors be ascetic, that they be celibate, okay, in some form or another. Because why? If your pastor doesn't have a wife, you don't have to care for him as much. Truly, if he doesn't have kids, he's gonna be devoting more time to the church. So it's not unreasonable, but it's also not completely biblical. We'll look at that here. So Genesis 1, 27. So, God created man in His own image, in the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created them. Why on earth would God create male and female if reproduction and having a wife was sinful? Well, you could say, well, God foreordains all that comes to pass, so perhaps making, making, this is me thinking philosophically here, making a concession for the future, knowing that the human race would have to exist in order that the Messiah could come into the world, perhaps he did that. We would say that's bunkus. Male and female, because we're complementary. That is where we're looking at next. 18 and this is this is a finer detail of the creation of man here Okay, this is not a this is a retelling but not a different event, right? Then the Lord God said it is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him Complimentary, okay now You don't have to have a spouse I'm not going to, you know, brow beat this to death here, but if you're not married, that's fine. Maybe that is what God has called you to be for the rest of your life. Maybe when you're 80 something years old, he'll provide you a spouse. I, you know, I married, I married really young and I praise God for it. Some people don't marry at all and that's good. That's fine. This is this God for ordains what comes to pass. We don't question, you know, Well, God really wanted me to get married, but I didn't. Well, that's your way of thinking. That's not God's way of thinking. It says that God made a helpmeet for helpmeet. And that word that's translated to me, it means like, they go together so good, it's like gears that mesh together. Correct. Really, one gear alone is worthless. It doesn't turn anything, does it? Right? So, that is... I'll let you guys read 1 Corinthians 7. There was actually, in my studies, I actually had 7 or 8 different verses from 1 Corinthians 7 we were going to read. But, for the sake of time, go home and read it. And, if you want to do further study, the material I gave you is excellent, especially because on the backs of several of them, there's a whole lot of references that you can further look up. So let's move on real quick. I don't know if I want to do this real quick with seven minutes on the clock. Item two, the lapsi, the lapsed. People who allowed their faith to lapse, to fall. Letter A, Emperor Decius, not a nice fellow, reigned from 249 to 251, was killed in battle. He issued an edict in late 249 that declared, quote, all inhabitants of the empire were required to sacrifice before the magistrates of their community, end quote, by a certain date. that varied by region. When they did so, they would be given a certificate recording the fact that they had complied with the imperial order. This sent waves through the church as many would be martyred for the faith, but some would sacrifice to the pagan gods or bribe an official into obtaining a certificate. This brought a lot of controversy, as it should. What do you do? Did you have a question, Ma? Rome. This is the Roman Empire. So North Africa, squarely, firmly in the Roman Empire. During this time frame, there was problems in the empire. And so it was really convenient that Decius, he did this in part to appease the pagan gods. In his viewpoint, people had stopped worshiping the emperor and the pagan gods, and so the gods were mad. And so he said, okay, every single citizen and subject of this empire has to go and offer sacrifice. That'll make the gods happy, right? His ulterior motive was also, we know that most of the Christians won't do it, so we can kill them. And this, it worked. It worked quite well. Not completely. Of course, God preserved his elect, but many, people did bribe or offer sacrifice. And that sacrifice could be something very simple. It could be a pinch of incense on an altar. It could be, you know, offering a dove or whatever. It could be participating in the sacrifice of a bull. You're there, you know, whatever, whatever. You didn't actually have to do the sacrificing in all cases. you were partaking in a pagan ceremony, and you would go up to the magistrate or the clerk, whoever it was, and say, my name is so-and-so. I have done as the emperor ordered, and he would write you a certificate that you better not lose. And if you were questioned on it, you could pull it out and say, no, no, I'm good. I'm a good pagan Roman, right? Well, trying to not sit in judgment of people who were in fear for their own lives and offered sacrifice, it's difficult. Because we look at them and we say, well, you've denied Christ. Christ said, if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my father. And the church had their Bible. And they knew that. They read it. So we look at B, those who complied with the imperial order were known as the lapsi. They had let their faith lapsed. They had, in action or word, denied Christ. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, he deserves his own lesson. He really deserves a full 45 minute, let's look deeply at Cyprian. He was a very godly man, very well learned in the scriptures. and he was a very preeminent bishop in Carthage, but he had some really interesting views on what it meant to be a pastor, an elder. We use the term bishop or presbyter. A bishop is an elder like Elijah, who is a preaching elder, right? He's a teaching elder. Our church makes that distinction between ruling and teaching, generally because in this day and age we want our ministers to go to seminary and become educated and be able to be a pastor well. I am currently a teaching elder, but teaching comma elder? I don't know how that works. True, the church did have a little bit of distinction there. You had presbyters who could either be a pastor or an elder. They were always an elder. They were an elder qualified man. And you had the bishop who was an elder who was the pastor. So we see a distinction fairly early. but they were all elders. Some churches pushed it farther than others. Cyprian actually had a very strong view of the bishop. He said the bishop of his own church is basically like the little emperor, which I disagree with him on profusely. The pastor and the elders authority is administrative and declarative. We can't tell you how to live your life. We can tell you to live your life godly, and if you don't, we're going to come talk to you, but you can ignore us. We can't twist your arm physically to do it, right? We wish we could, but we can't. No killing people. No killing people. Jesus said truth to twelve. And to do that, whoever wants to be great must be certainly divine. Absolutely. And that really, I mean, that is the biblical, clearly, because it's, Jesus said it, but it is that if you expand that doctrine, that really in its fullness is biblical. Cyprian, one of the things that I have against him, and the church generally has, is he had a very strong view of the bishop, but he believed all bishops were equal. There was no one bishop that was in more authority over the church than the bishop next door, right? There was no pope. Interestingly enough, oh man, we're not gonna make it, guys. Oh, we got one minute, okay. I'm not gonna go over time by more than a minute. Let me work on Cyprian for a minute. C, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, he was born 210, died 258. He addressed the issue of the lapsey in a local council in 251 that ruled that the lapsey could return to the church after a time of penance. I should have put penance in quotations after a time of penance and on recommendation of their bishop. So he wanted penance and repentance in this early age often were the same thing. You were welcome to come back to the church. You had to repent of your sin. That's biblical. At time of penance, you couldn't just, you couldn't deny Christ and get a certificate and just walk back up to the church and say, I'm sorry. Now, if somebody was sincere, I mean, and genuinely heart-struck in their soul that they had just denied Christ, like Peter, right? And they repent, true repentance, the church actually doesn't have that authority to say, no, you're not, that's not, say you're sorry to your sister, you're faking it, right? We can't see the heart, we can see the action. Ruth, you're dying to say something. The Symbian fellow, what was his actual position that he was able to bring this forth? This was pretty much his position. No, I mean, was he anybody? Oh, good point. Let me see if I can answer that real quick. This will be probably the last thing we say before we run out of time. During one of the persecutions, he fled the city because he was not going to deny Christ, and so he was going to remove himself from the situation. He lived in a cave for several years, wrote lots of letters to lots of people, had elders sending letters all over the place, which was viewed by many, not everybody, as an act of cowardice. We talked earlier, there was this view of martyrdom that was, if you're going to be martyred, just go get martyred. Some would say, you know, even seek it out. Well, Cyprian didn't believe you should seek it out. In fact, you should preserve your life if you can. We would agree. He was a bishop. Yeah, he was a bishop. We're going to have to finish this up next week because it's too good. I'll see if I can get a little more information about Cyprian next week to send home with you guys. I think you'll like him. You may not like him. I mean, that's okay too. Pete? Those people tore the roof open and let the guy down on the stretcher. Did Jesus say, after a time of penance, your sins are forgiven? No. No, the time of penance was from the moment he started being lowered through the roof. I'm joking. I'm joking. No. No, Jesus didn't say that. Right? Repentance is between you and God. And our confessions say, you know, you're stricken. You have a true heartfelt repentance. And the Lord is what sees our hearts. We can fool people sometimes. I've been fooled lots of times. It's easy to fool people. We're silly. But we cannot fool the Lord. Yes, amen. It's the time thing that I just didn't attach. Yeah, the time and that time would vary. It may be a short amount of time. It could be, you know, are you sincere? Well, you're going to wait a couple months before we let you back in and let you have communion with us. Again, it's a response to something that happened. Perhaps it's an over-response. We're going to see some severe over-response next week and the rest of the lesson. Yes, and we're actually going to see a significant amount of that. This built some tradition. Let's pray. Our gracious God, we thank you for your mercy to us. We thank you that you hear our prayer. We thank you that you love us. Lord, we thank you for your grace, your Holy Spirit, which enables us to even believe. O Lord, continue to work upon our hearts to mold us into the image of our Savior, O Lord. Lord, we pray that you bless us as we go into worship. Lord, that you meet with us, that you be with our pastor as he proclaims the Word of God. O Lord, we pray that you open our spiritual hearts to hear your word, to be penetrated by it, to be changed by it, to be formed by it. We pray this for the sake of our Savior, who loved us, gave himself for us, Jesus Christ. Amen.