Well, I want to begin this morning by asking a question to you. The question is, is there a central message of the Bible? If so, what is it? So to answer this question, I'm going to go to what is quite literally the central text of the Bible, at least the way that our Protestant canon is arranged. This text is Psalm 119. Psalm. This song is the longest of all the Psalms, and it's actually the longest chapter in the entire Bible. And the content of Psalm 119 is completely fascinating to me. It's a giant poem consists of 176 total lines. These lines are subdivided into 22 sections consisting of eight lines apiece. In each of these 22 sections, all eight lines begin with the same letter of the alphabet. The next section then changes to the next letter of the alphabet, going all the way through the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And so this makes Psalm 119 an acrostic poem. So what is the point of an acrostic poem? Well, besides making it easier to memorize, because it goes through the whole alphabet. It's literally a way of teaching you totality. Just like when John says Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is the last. So it's like saying that Jesus is the A and the Z. And thus, the verse continues that he is the beginning and the end. In other words, he's the totality. But Psalm 119 is remarkable among acrostic poems because it has eight lines rather than just one that each begin with the new letter. And so the number eight becomes this incredibly important thing for interpreting the meaning of the psalm. And this will have bearing on one of its two main messages. So let's look at the explicit message of the psalm first. It's impossible to miss this when you read it. Using eight different synonyms repeated over and over throughout the poem, this is a song about loving God's law. In fact, he says four different times, I love your law. So the explicit message of God's word in its central chapter is loving the law of God. But who is the he in the psalm that does this loving? Well, this question cannot be more important He tells us that he is a king who is afflicted while he's living in great tension with those in authority who want him dead. He calls them the proud, the wicked, and the evildoers. It's into this setting that the psalm gives several references to time. And curiously, these times go in order of a Jewish day from midnight to the cock crow to dawn to noon. Now the Jews divided the day, coincidentally, into eight blocks of three hours each, beginning with the evening and going through the ninth through eleventh hour of what we would call the next day. At some point, perhaps even at the very beginning, a tradition arose among them on Pentecost to recite one-eighth of this poem at the beginning of each of the eight blocks of the day. Pentecost was the day that they celebrated through a festival the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. So that makes sense that you would do this. Now our Lord himself may have had this very thing in mind on that very day when he gave his last words in Matthew teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And you remember Pentecost in Acts is the day of that ascension into heaven. Something else also began to happen in the early church, and this is rooted also in the number eight that predominates the song. Eight was called by the fathers the octave, following after musical notes that repeat, just like the days of the week, on the eighth. The octave, they said, that is the themes involving eight throughout this and other places in the Old Testament, foreshadowed the resurrection of Jesus in the Old Testament. And curiously, there are themes in each of the eight sections of this psalm that correspond to the eight stages of the last day of Jesus's life, beginning on the night he was betrayed and going through the ninth hour in which he died. And as such, this song's message is more than just about the law. To put this all another way, the literary structure and the number eight and the time frames of a singular day And the context of the psalmist situation in which the song is sung and the last day of Jesus all point to an implicit prophetic message of Psalm 119. And that message is the gospel that focuses on the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, you have two central messages to the central chapter of one of the greatest masterpieces in the whole Bible. And that is the law. and the gospel. Now given that we are at that time of season where we remember the Reformation, I thought it would be interesting for a moment to think about what they considered the central message of the Bible. The Reformation was this mighty movement of God where he used many men from all over Europe to recover truths long obscured in the Roman Church through suppression, intimidation, and superstition. Or if I wanted to be a little less harsh, The medieval church had subverted true religion by appealing to man's fascination with moralism and mysticism and the miraculous. Three ladders that Martin Luther said, people climb to glimpse God in the nude or as he is in his bare essence that is not clothed with the word of God. As the reformers sought to recover the ground of our faith, this is what they called Sola Scriptura, scripture alone. In unison, they taught the central message of the Bible is the law and the gospel. This perfectly fits with the central text of the Bible, Psalm 119. In fact, listen to what Luther himself said about this psalm. He said, we must hear what God promises, that's the gospel, and what he threatens. This is done with prophet as the first and the 119th Psalms teach. Theodore Beza was the protege of John Calvin. And he said, we divide the word of God into two principal parts or kinds. One is called law, the other is the gospel. For all the rest can be gathered under the one or the other of these two headings. Calvin explained the gospel is the message, the salvation bringing proclamation concerning Christ that was sent by God the Father to procure eternal life. The law is contained in precepts. It threatens, it burdens, it promises no goodwill. The gospel acts without threats. It does not drive one on by precepts, but rather teaches us about the supreme will of God towards us. Luther said the law is and teaches what we should do. But the gospel is what God will give to us. The first we cannot fulfill. The second we take hold of by faith. This distinction was crucial to all of them. Beza said, ignorance of this distinction between law and gospel is one of the principal sources of the abuses which corrupted and still corrupt Christianity. Spurgeon said, some men put the law instead of gospel, others put gospel instead of law. A certain class maintains that the law and the gospel are mixed. And then he says, these men understand not the truth and are false teachers. Yersinus, the author of the Heidelberg Catechism, said that to confuse them is to corrupt the faith at its core. As exemplified in Psalm 119, the reformers came to this position because they were deeply committed to sola scriptura. They wanted to return to the biblical message rather than to a message invented or corrupted or eclipsed by the teachings of men. However, they were equally committed to recovering the historical Christian message as taught by the church throughout all her long history. Now that might sound like a contradiction, but not at all. This was not merely an awakening, nor a great revival, much less some kind of a cultish movement infiltrated with unknown doctrines until the cult leader came along. Rather, this was a reformation. And to reform, by definition, means to take something that already exists and make it better without destroying the core of the teaching. The Reformers insisted that the message of the Bible had always been with and in the church, but needed to be revisited in their day because so many other things were overshadowing and covering it. Now it's into this that I want to turn to the substance of what's going to be a short five week series. It will focus on one half of this central message of the Bible. That half will be the gospel. Now the law is obviously vitally important too, but since you have it written on your heart at birth, we can do that another time. The gospel is this glorious other thing that comes from a place far outside of yourself. It's something that God did not put into your conscience by nature like he did the law. And yet I believe that each man has a longing that deep down in our hearts we know that we want to be made right with God and be at peace with him. The gospel is our salvation. It's how God brings us peace and reconciles us to himself. So to do this, I'm going to be looking at four main creeds of the early church, with perhaps a fifth and maybe a couple of others thrown in at some places. I'm gonna compare and contrast them, asking ourselves why they've been so important to Christ's bride for nearly 2,000 years. But just here, I want to address a problem. I just said that the reformers were not fond of man-made traditions and the inventions of men. There's an entire swath of Christians that believe creeds are man-made inventions of men. This makes them, in the words of one recent online discussion I was coincidentally reading, quote, satanic. Now that's quite a claim that even the most anti-credo Christians that I know would not say. But it does reflect a softer, similar sentiment, and that sentiment involves a deep-seated belief that creeds are divisive and tear apart the unity of Christians. In the words of one sectarian who begat an entire denomination of this thinking, this is what he says, our opposition to creeds arose from a conviction that whether the opinion in them were true or false, they were hostile to union, peace, harmony, purity, and joy of Christians, and averse to the conversion of the world to Jesus Christ. In other words, nothing man-made can be unifying. Only the Bible can be unifying. Now the anti-creedal mentality of our present time has so overtaken our culture that it seems to me if you were to ask a baby boomer and their children what creed was, they would probably think of that famous boxer who fought Rocky Balboa. You could ask a Gen Xer and their children what creed is, and they'd probably think of a post-grunge metal band from Tallahassee. A millennial and their children probably think it refers to a video game called Assassin's Creed. And if I'm right, this is a terribly sad commentary on our society. Frankly, Americans used to know full well what the creeds were, but not anymore. In the church, it isn't a whole lot better. In this case, each of these four generations, starting with the boomers and their systematic dismantling of institutions and traditions in the 60s, there's this mentality that predominates. It's known by a saying, and that saying is, no creed but Christ. What's ironic is that this is itself a creed. And even more ironic is that it's totally man-made. I was listening to a YouTube video of a pastor in the above denomination that takes great pride on having no creeds. Sola scriptura, he demanded, not realizing that this isn't taken from the Bible either, and it is itself a man-made creed, and one that I agree with, by the way. But he said sola scriptura as he abused the phrase, and then in what I viewed as this hopelessly naive, contradictory, and impossible to live out worldview. He gave an illustration. He said, a man saying, I believe in the Bible alone, but also having a creed is like having a Bible. And he pulls out his Bible and holds it in his hand. And he says, having a Bible that's weighed down and impossible to open because another book's on top of it. And he throws this huge book on top of the Bible so that it makes a loud thud. He says, if you have your Bible and then read it any other way, then the creed says you're wrong. Sounds great to a lot of people, right? Scripture alone must mean that. The problem is it doesn't. First of all, let's just deal with this. No creed that I have ever seen is longer than the Bible itself, okay? The creeds that we're going to be looking at range from around 60 words to 170 or so. That doesn't even take you one third of the way through the first chapter of Matthew's gospel. So if he's talking about creeds, he should have put a piece of paper on the Bible rather than a book that was bigger than the Bible. Second, even if you take a Confession of Faith, which is a much longer document, even that pales in comparison to the Bible. For example, our London Baptist Confession, 1689, it's about 16,000 words, including the signatures and the introductions. Matthew's gospel by itself is longer than that. So even the most expansive of creeds still pale in comparison. He should have thrown a booklet on the Bible, not war and peace. Third, it doesn't seem to dawn on people that if they won't use something like a creed to interpret the Bible, they're still going to use something. Most often that something is either their own sectarian leader's interpretation or their own. So I would suggest that what people are doing in throwing creeds into the dumpster fire, instead of throwing a piece of paper on the Bible, they're actually throwing themselves on top of the Bible. And a man is exponentially heavier and bulkier than even war and peace. If you thought it was hard to open the Bible with that book on top, try it with a man lying on top of it. Now, when it comes to interpretation, every single thought that we have about the Bible is, by definition, not the Bible. You understand that? This makes our own thoughts about it identical to the very thing that is supposedly evil, which are creeds. For the authors of the creeds are no less human than I am. Now, I'm not saying it's bad to have your own thoughts about the Bible. I'm saying it's bad to damn the thoughts of others, especially those thoughts that are combined views of all the churches coming together to craft their thoughts, all while saying that your own thoughts are superior to everyone else's and incapable of being wrong. Fourth, whether they have a stated creed or not, every church has doctrine. And their doctrine is just as exclusionary as the creeds, even if they're not written down. These are the unwritten creeds found in every church. someone asks us to consider the following hypothetical situation. He says, if a Baptist and a Presbyterian were to come to an anti-credal church and say, hey, we're going to teach on the meaning of baptism today, first from the Baptist faith and message, and then from the Westminster Confession of Faith, since the anti-credal has no creed but Christ, we all affirm the Bible, which we can teach here, right? the duel would quickly be told otherwise. Why? Because everyone has a creed, even and especially those who say they don't. And so, as Ligon Duncan says, no creed but Christ is a lousy creed. Now, before moving on, I would like to get specific about a friend of mine and his podcast, which has become very popular in recent days as it pertains to this. I do this because it's a good example of how people misread others. His podcast is called The Naked Bible Podcast. Its self-description is the following, quote, biblical theology stripped bare of denominational confessions and theological systems by exposing context. Now, some people have taken my friend to mean that creeds are evil. It's easy to see why they would think that based on this description. And honestly, I'm not particularly fond of the way he's branded this. This is mostly because of what he himself has said about this. Here's a quote from him in another place. He says, there's a pervasive tendency in the believing church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions and denominational preferences. Continuing the quote, this is not a bad thing. This is a human thing. Creeds are useful for distilling important points of theology, but they're far from the whole counsel of God and even farther from the biblical world. This is something to be aware of at all times. Now, my friend admits that no one is an island of pristine neutrality. He admits that we all read the Bible through filtered lenses. What he's concerned about is a good concern. Creeds and confessions don't say everything. But then again, they were never meant to. But what they do say is something every Christian really should heed, for their focus is on the most important things. And that takes me to the heart of what I want to say about why we're going to look at the creeds in this series. Putting confessions of faith aside, since we're not going to deal with those, the creeds have a very specific focus. And by creeds, I'm talking about those earliest of church documents that hit specifically on the nature of God and the person and work of the Son of God made flesh. Specifically, we're going to look at the Apostles' Creed and its precursor, the old Roman symbol, that many of you probably have never heard about, and two forms of the Nicene Creed. Each of these are built upon the others, except for the first, which is built upon even earlier teachings that seem to go back to the very earliest church. Now, these creeds are short statements about the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. and their collective work in bringing us salvation. And as I said, they generally take between 60 to 200 words to do this. What we call this is the gospel. They are nothing short of the gospel. And as it regards the gospel, they are all divisible in two parts. This is how you break apart the creeds. You have a very brief first part and a much longer second part. These two parts of what I call the subjective and the objective gospel. The objective is the content, the meat, the doctrine, the thing to be believed. The gospel is a message, and this message comes to us through the Holy Scripture. The creeds take the scriptures teaching and put them in the form of simple declarations or statements of doctrine. Those doctrines are the objective good news of God and what he's done to bring us salvation through Christ, Christ alone. And that's all they are. The subjective is extremely important and very short and I think often goes unnoticed. It comes at the very beginning of all the creeds. It's usually just two words. I believe. Or in some forms, we believe. In fact, the word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which literally means I believe. So you can't have a creed without I believe. It's not possible. This is subjective because this is your part. This is faith. This is what you yourself confess to believe, the doctrines and person of the gospel. You believe who this God is and what he's done for you. And through this belief, God saves you. In a word, this is sola fide, faith alone. The great Rich Molens, who ironically came out of a Quaker anti-Credo background, put it this way in his song that he calls Creed. wherein he literally sings through the entire Apostle's Creed, and then he has this stanza. I believe what I believe. It's what makes me what I am. I did not make it. No, it is making me. It's the very truth of God, not the invention of any man. I believe it. I believe. Nothing could be more central to hear, to ponder, to learn, to discuss, or to believe, or to enjoy, or to love. They are so important that our church has said one of them nearly every week since we began. And those weeks that we do not, we're usually confessing the actual statements that are in them that come from the Bible themselves in the creeds of the scripture. In fact, yes, the Bible has creeds. Probably the most famous in the Old Testament is this. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might. This is the Jewish credo, the Shema, which Jews to this day recite two times a day. It teaches you who God is and what he requires of you. It is law and gospel. The New Testament has creeds, too. It has many of them. Peter gave us a very short one. Who do you say that I am? You are the Christ, the son of the living God. That's a creed. Paul tells us one said regularly by the early church in First Timothy 3 16. God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received upon in glory. Philippians 2 gives us one of the most famous biblical creeds. Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Being born in the likeness of men, being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name. so that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Probably the creed that most closely resembles the largest portions of our creeds is found in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says, I deliver to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas and then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. See, this is the gospel, sola gratia, grace alone, the work of God outside of you done through Christ that exalts and glorifies God, soli deo gloria, to God alone the glory, even while it saves sinners from hell by giving them new life when they look to Christ by faith. So I ask, what could be more important than that? Now, I want to return to this idea that creeds divide. Because guess what? In a sense, they do. But the question is, what do they divide over? There's a famous saying that over the years I've come to actually like more and more. I originally didn't like it at all because of how I saw people abuse it. And it shows a kind of wisdom that many do not seem to appreciate. The saying goes something like this. In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. and in all things charity or love." Now this saying is often attributed to Augustine. This is unfortunately a Christian tall tale. Its origins go back to a Lutheran theologian in 1626 and to a Catholic archbishop who turned against the papacy in 1617. Though this saying can, like anything else, be abused, I've seen that happen personally, at its best, it teaches us that certain kinds of doctrine should not divide brothers, while certain doctrine must divide. Those which must divide are called essentials. Now, unfortunately, I haven't been able to determine what the original speakers of this meant when they said essentials, so that kind of leaves it up to each person. And that isn't a great thing. Frankly, every person's going to have slightly to hugely different ideas about what essentials are that must divide. But as I've thought about this question for nearly 25 years, I've come to the following conclusion. Splitting churches over the color of the nursery walls should fall into neither of the two doctrinal categories, but into the third. In all things, love. Having a robust confession of faith is a good thing. I believe especially if we keep the third idea in mind. However, confessions are not dividing lines between what makes someone Christian versus non-Christian, save at those essential points upon which they're built. That was never their intent, and anyone who uses them that way is turning a force for good into a weapon for evil and woe be upon them. Those who espouse the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the London Baptist Confession, they're all Christians. And there are many more besides these, including confessions that do not hail from the Magisterial Reformation. In these, there should be a certain kind of liberty to disagree on minor details that do not pertain to the law and the gospel. I think the only objective way of determining what an essential is, is by going back to the early church to see what they, together sent their best ordained ministers who traveled great distances at great cost to discuss. They spent many weeks and untold hours debating and finally ended up crafting unifying documents for the whole church to be most distilled, refined, purified, extracted, essential doctrine that binds all Christians together through time and space. And the fact is we have precious few of these. which makes getting the essentials relatively an easy thing. Now there have been many, many creeds penned over the centuries, but there are a select few that we can count on one hand that fits this bill. These are what we typically call the ecumenical creeds. You can look that up, there's a whole Wikipedia on it. Ecumenical is a word that means representing the whole. And it includes the worldwide church. Now sadly, like creeds and confessions, this word has been badly abused in our day, especially by those who want no creed but Christ. And some of them even then want to import whatever they feel like into the definition of Christ. So I'm not talking about a heretical ecumenism here. I'm talking about the councils and creeds that have been accepted by the entire church, all branches going back to the beginning. It's easy here to become upset because some of these branches were and are today in need of great reformation. And by the way, that certainly has to include almost all Protestants. Some do not even want to consider them as churches, and today some of them aren't. But to import more modern heresies into the early church is anachronistic. In the early church, there wasn't a Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist. Those are all labels that came upon each group later after two or more sides splintered and split away. It's perhaps closer to the history of it to talk about how all the known churches of the world came together to craft or adopt a creed. It's better to think of it this way. The church at Corinth was represented, the churches of Galatia, the church at Rome, the church of Antioch, the church at Jerusalem, the churches of Asia Minor, such as Ephesus in Philadelphia, the church at Lyons, the church at Hippo, and so on and so forth. Now, what did they come together to do? Well, they weren't trying to say everything. They were crafting creeds that they saw as unifying documents. Documents that would show people that the entire church agreed that this is and has always been the apostolic teaching on the nature of God and the person and work of Christ. They weren't making up new things. They were putting old things into a simple form so that a person might know what the most essential truths of the gospel are and what the whole church agreed upon this. They had to do this because heresies were attacking the most fundamental doctrines and they were spreading like wildfire and poisoning like gangrene. And these heresies are what destroys true unity. As the old song teaches, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed, right? The church, just like the apostles in the New Testament, viewed heresies of the first order of magnitude as essential to fight. The creeds gave us these few statements as marks of what are essential so that the unity of true Christians might be preserved instead of destroyed. The job of the church was to watch and fight the good fight of faith. That's what the creeds do at their best. So what are the select few creeds? Well, these are historical documents of the second through fourth centuries. The Lutherans have identified three of them. They say the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. I'm going to be looking at two of these, and I'll throw the third into the mix only from time to time. This is because the Athanasian Creed is most likely much later, 5th or 6th century, and it was not written by Athanasius, and it's never mentioned in any records of the ecumenical councils. So if that leaves two, then how do I get four? Because earlier I said I'm going to go through four. Well, besides the Apostles' Creed, we're going to be looking at the Old Roman Symbol, which predates it, and which stands as the basis of all four of them. And then besides the Nicene Creed of 325, I'm also going to add the later additions that came in 381, which makes it significantly longer. In fact, that's the one that we usually say in our church. All churches everywhere that are Orthodox accept the Nicene Creed. All Western churches accept the other three, though the Roman symbol is the least heard of and is the least recited. So I'm going to give you a short history of the four of these. The Old Roman symbol is sometimes called the Old Roman Creed. In its final form, it's not mentioned until 340 AD. However, Rufinus, who lived right around that time, believed that it was the rule of faith composed by the apostles themselves at Jerusalem. That's what he says. And whether or not that is true, it is clearly based on the second century rule of faith, which is stated by Irenaeus a couple different times. Irenaeus lived from 130 to 202 AD. That's a long time ago. This is what he says. This then is the order of the rule of our faith. God, the father, not made, not material, invisible, one God, the creator of all things. This is the first point of our faith. The second point is the word of God, son of God, Christ Jesus, our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets according to the form of their prophesying and according to the method of their dispension of the father through whom all things were made, who also at the end of times to complete and gather up all things was made man among men, visible and tangible in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce a community of union between God and man. And the third point is the Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and the fathers learned the things of God. And the righteous were led forth into the way of righteousness and who in the end of times was poured out in a new way upon mankind in all the earth, renewing man unto God. So can you hear the tri-part? structure threefold, Father, Son, Spirit, in Irenaeus' rule of faith. Now this was also found in Tertullian, this tripartite structure, and they both called this the rule of faith. A rule is a standard or an ultimate authority. And because they're saying, this is what our rule of faith is, and it's so well defined, this has clearly been around for a long time, even when Irenaeus wrote it. I have no doubt that the apostles themselves had the original hand in what became of all these creeds. Now the old Roman symbol is very similar, although it's shorter than what I just read, and you will hear that it sounds quite familiar. And I hope when I read this that it's sweet music in your ears. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus, his only son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. who under Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father, once he will come to judge the living and the dead, and in the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Church, the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, the life everlasting." That's the Old Roman Creed. Now that sounds so familiar because the Apostles' Creed clearly reflects its language. In fact, the Apostles' Creed is 76% identical to it, adding only one line, and that line is, he descended into hell, and a word or statement here and there for clarification. In its present form, now, our earliest account of the Apostles' Creed is 750 AD. However, a similar tradition to the old Roman symbol is found very early on with the Apostles' Creed, which is that after Pentecost, the Apostles composed this creed, which goes by their name, each contributing a clause. Peter begins, I believe in God the Father, and Matthias ends in the life everlasting, amen. Paul is, of course, excluded from this series because he's not yet a Christian. That's the tradition. This was written so early on, it was the Council of Jerusalem, and Paul hadn't even been converted yet. That's amazing. Now, the Nicene Creed of 325 came out of the first Council of Nicaea that same year. Now, the Council was called primarily to deal with the Arian heresy, which had been sweeping through the churches. The creed that came out of it was the first to be accepted by all churches, because all the churches participated in its adoption. It was truly ecumenical in the best sense of the word, although, of course, Arians would have disagreed with that, but they were the ones attacking the deity of Christ, after all. It was Eusebius of Caesarea, the great church historian, who first suggested the council adopt the creed that had long been said in his own church. So as they're sitting there arguing, fighting, what creed should we adopt? He raised his hand and said, we have a great one in Caesarea. It was a fine and orthodox creed, but it didn't address the Arian controversy. Instead, Nicaea continued with the same basic tripart division of all the creeds, but it expanded the section on Jesus to reflect his deity and oneness with the Father. They also added a bit about how Jesus came to save us at the point of confessing his incarnation, and an anathema at the end for those who deny the deity of Christ. This part is rarely recited in the churches. Now, in total, this creed, the first Nicaean, and I'm just gonna use the English, is 171 words. It's 115 words if you don't include the anathema. That makes it only two words longer than the Apostle's Creed. Now, if it added so much to the person of Christ, which it did, how can it be so close in word count to the Apostle's Creed? It's because like Eusebius' Creed, it basically stops at confessing belief in the Holy Spirit. So you say, I believe in God the Father, what He is, the Son, a whole long stuff about the Son, and in the Holy Spirit, end of creed. All that comes after in the old Roman symbol and the Apostles' Creed, that's left off the first Nicene Creed. This is where we meet our fourth and final creed, the Nicene Creed of 381. Now this was adopted at the Second Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople that same year. It is significantly different from the original Nicene Creed, although it retains enough of the language about Christ being Light of Light, Very God of Very God, that it's still called the Nicene Creed. This creed contains 212 words, as we're going to use it, making it by far the longest of the four. And it does this even as it eliminates the entire anathema at the end of the first Nicene Creed. So what is it doing? Well, while retaining much of the anti-Aryan language of the first Nicene Creed, it also adds back a whole bunch of language that we find in the other two creeds, which was dropped. And then it fleshes out a bit more in several sections, including a lengthy addition to what we believe about the Holy Spirit and baptism. This creed adds a phrase found in none of the others, which is, according to the scriptures. And this is language lifted right out of the creed in 1 Corinthians 15. Also, it's so close to the catechetical lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem that many scholars believe that this creed is simply a revision of the creed Cyril was using in Jerusalem. All the churches were already using creeds, that's the point. I find this one particularly fascinating because it takes us back to the place where the Old Roman Symbol and Apostles' Creed were both said to have originated with the Apostles in Jerusalem. And as such, it comes as no surprise that it adopts much of the language from those creeds that were left out of the original Nicene Creed. Now in the weeks to come, we're going to be looking at these creeds, reading them together and reading them apart. Rather than going one creed per week, which you might think I do since I'm going to go through four creeds, I'm going to divide this study the way I learned that Calvin divides the Institutes, which follows the four-part organization of the Apostles' Creed. Did you know that? And thus, we're going to spend the first week considering God the Father, the second, thinking about God the Son, the third, God the Holy Spirit, and the fourth, the remaining truths about the church and the second coming. We're going to take deep dives into these doctrines and we'll go to great pains to see that every word of these creeds is rooted in the biblical teaching. We're going to be using the small catechism of Martin Luther, who actually has a proof text for every single line. Fascinating. These are not man-made doctrines, even if they do reflect later situations and circumstances that cause them to be written down for us. Now I'm doing this not merely so that you can know what it is the church has always believed and confessed. That's important. And not merely so that you can gain some new information, but because these creeds give us the gospel half of the central message of the Bible. And I'm hardly alone in desiring that you see these things. These are documents that have been written about by many fine teachers for nearly 2,000 years. They've been preached by many fine preachers and are worth our finest thoughts and time considering even in our own day. There can be nothing more important than thinking about the only message on earth that can save a person from damnation, sin, death, and Satan, especially in an anti-credo culture that is hell-bent on overthrowing Orthodox Christianity. And thus Augustine begins his own work on the creeds by saying this. I think these are the very first words. He says, receive my sons, the rule of faith, which is called the creed. When you have received it, write it on your hearts, recite it daily to yourselves before you go to sleep, before you go forth, fortify yourselves with the creed. No one writes the creed so that it can be read. Let your memory be your codex that you may be able to review, review it if you should happen. That forgetfulness effaces what diligence has given you. You will believe what you hear yourself saying and your lips will repeat what you believe. The apostle says truly for with the heart of man believes into justice and with the mouth profession of faith is made to salvation. This is the creed that you will be going over in your thoughts and repeating from memory. These words that you have heard are scattered throughout the divine scriptures. They've been assembled and unified to facilitate the memory of dull mankind in order that everyone will be able to say the creed and adhere to what he believes. Now, the impulse to rebel against creeds can be rooted in a kernel of truth. All lies are rooted in a kernel of truth. We don't want to misuse them. However, let me put such rebellion bluntly by using our friend who earlier called the Nicaea satanic. If creeds are satanic, then this means it's satanic to believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. How can this be satanic? If they are satanic, then it's satanic to confess that Jesus Christ is God in human flesh, born of a virgin, suffered under an historic governor who put him to death so that we might be saved, but was raised to new life and ascended to heaven where he sits enthroned as king of kings. If creeds are satanic, then it's satanic to confess that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, whom God sent to create his church and forgive us of our sins. You want to talk about division, not unity. If this is what you think, then you're not a Christian. It's that simple. And you need to repent and turn to God in Christ for forgiveness of this most serious of sins. If you do not think this, but you've never confessed Christ by saying, I believe these things, then stop wasting time and confess the God of scripture, the God of the creeds. For these creeds give you the gospel of the triune God through whom and by which you are saved. If you have confessed, then come with me on this journey into the central message of the gospel as found throughout scripture and put so beautifully in the creeds. Creeds were never meant to force you to believe everything, only the most basic things. They were meant as things that bring us together, not that draw us apart. They're meant to show you the way to God through Christ by the Holy Spirit. Blessed be the most high for preserving them for his church. And may he give us a blessing as we dive into them so that we might know him better. Let's pray together. Father, I do ask that even though this is introductory, we've certainly gone over much scripture even today. as it's been distilled in the creeds and as we've seen it even in the scripture itself. I would pray, Lord, that you would give us a hunger and a thirst to know the most essential, important truths that there are in a new and exciting way. Nothing in this world should be more exciting to us than the message that created life in us in the first place. this message of who our great God is as father, son and spirit and what our great God has done to bring us salvation. I would pray that you would bless us as we go forward in this future. But also, Lord, as we hear these words today, my prayer is that everyone in this room would believe these things themselves and that they would confess them, that this would be their credo. And I would ask that you would open hearts and minds, sanctify us through your word and save us by your word. For Christ's sake, I pray that he would gain all the glory for what he has done for us. And it's in his name I ask these things, amen.