Okay, so we continue our studies and we're working our way through church history and we've been in the period of church history that Jesus refers to as the angel of the church in Thyatira. That's in Revelation chapter 2. verse 18 and we see from an historical period that goes from about 500 AD to about 1500 AD around there it's the thousand years devil a millennium of the Dark Ages that even secular historians speak to this as a time of great dearth and and just of poverty, of knowledge, and wealth, and spirituality all throughout Europe. And he said that, you know, they got a lot of problems here. They have a woman teaching named Jezebel in verse 20, and she's seducing my servants to commit fornication and eat things sacrificed unto idols. And he says that he gave her space to repent in verse 21, Of the fornication, but she repented not and he's talking about that period in time between 325 and 500 AD he gave about what is that 175 years for them to get things, right? I've given you a chart here of a comparison of the true church next to the counterfeit church And we see in the true church, as Jesus said from the beginning, the important thing is the first love. And the first love is the Lord Jesus Christ and God. That's what our first commandment is, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength. And of course, Jesus said, I and the Father are one. So the first love of the true church is the Lord Jesus Christ. God the Father and then we see the false church their first love is mother church and Whenever you talk to someone that's in a a false Christian church You'll find they're always talking about their church and the history of their church and the tradition of the church and the greatness of their church they don't talk about the Lord and and then we saw the thing with authority and Jesus said The authority is always the Scriptures, to sanctify them through Thy truth, Father. Thy Word is truth, and all Scripture is given by the inspiration of God, and it's profitable that the man of God may be perfect. And we're supposed to search the Scriptures, and the authority in the true Church is the Holy Scriptures. And, of course, the Spirit of God guides us into the truth of the Holy Scriptures. But we saw that the authority of the false church is something called the magisterium, the rulers of the church, the priests and the bishops and the cardinals and the popes and the higher-ups. And Jesus mentioned back in verse 6 and back in verse 15 that that's something called the deeds of the Nicolaitans. And the nico, the nico means victory, those that have the victory over the laity, over the people, and those are the higher-ups. And he says, I hate that thing. He says in verse 6, and he says it again in verse 15, I hate that thing, where there's a hierarchy within my church, because in my church, Jesus says, I am the head, and you're all brothers and sisters. And you call no man father, and no man rabbi, and no man master. You're all brothers and sisters in Christ. And so we see the false church as the magisterium We saw also the the great change in doctrine and the teachings that are given within the church Using the scriptures the doctrine of the true church is the epistles of paul Because jesus christ gave the revelation to paul as he explains in the book of galatians that christ himself taught me what i'm supposed to teach the churches so we know the books of romans and Corinthians and Galatians and Ephesians and Philippians and Colossians and Thessalonians and Timothy and Titus are the books that we're supposed to follow as a church. And that's going to be our doctrine and how the pillar and the ground of Jesus Christ Church is built upon the Word of God in Paul's epistles, rightly dividing the Word of Truth, not trying to build an Old Testament setup. Building a New Testament set up according to Paul's epistles, but we saw the false church their doctrine now becomes councils and decrees and the traditions and the dogmas written by the magisterium and a whole new set of books is introduced in here and for example This is the true story of a Roman Catholic priest. I spoke with this man on the phone. He's gone home to be with the Lord. He was more like my father's age, and he talks about how he became a priest. And the name of the book is called The Pilgrimage From Rome the true story of a Roman Catholic priests search for faith the former father Bartholomew Brewer and He says when I was young I went into the seminary I think he they put him in there at the age of 16 and a half years old and it took him 12 years to become a priest and And he says, in this seminary, seminary comes from the Latin word seminarium, which means a seed plot. And he said, we were brought into this place and we knew that we'd be taken away from our family. And visiting was restricted. We didn't want people to interfere with us. We wanted to learn from the higher-ups. And so we ate together. He said one of the first things they did one day was they put him in a room. Let me see. He describes it here. He says, They put me in an 8x12 room furnished with a hard plywood bed, a thin mat, a locker, a desk and a chair, and a cross hanging on the wall with no corpus, no Jesus hanging on it, because as a novice, I was to find Christ wherever He might be and however I might without the use of a Bible. And so that's how he's supposed to find him. And he said, we were in here in this little thing and it stifled our development. It fostered immaturity. It created problems in our sexual identification because being celibate is against nature. I mean, God expects men to be married. When we would sit together for dinner, he said we would all sit quietly at the table. We weren't allowed to speak. And the head table, there was the father rector and visiting priests. And on the other side, there was a lectern. And people would read a book to us through the meal. What, like the Gospel of John? Like the Book of Romans? Like Ben-Hur? Like the greatest story ever told? One of the favorite ones was a book by John O'Brien called The Faith of Millions. In that book it explained to us that Christ is brought down from heaven by the priest. and he's presented as a victim of the man's sins. We were told that when the priest speaks, God bows his head in humble obedience to his commands. In Latin, the priest is in a place equal to omnipotent God. The teachings that we gave were exalted the priest. This is from the Faith of Millions by John O'Brien. Because at a certain moment in the Mass, the priest could command the obedience of God himself. We were lifted above all mortals. We learned that we as priests had power over the very body of Jesus Christ. We were told that God placed in our hands the keys to paradise, and he has raised the priest above all the kings of the earth and above all the angels of heaven. We were told that the priest is like God himself, a sense of omnipotence, and we were to be subjected to no one on the planet except the superiors in our church. And the one publication told us That if we went down the street one day and we met a priest or an angel, we were to salute the priest before saluting the angel, because the priest holds the place of God. And obedience to the church superiors was taught from our very core the moment we got there. To question the church was to question God Almighty. Anyone who dared question Our doubt anything that was taught by a superior would never reach ordination We moved through a spiritual desert toward ordination with the driving sands of false doctrine and ancient tradition Blinding us and we were told that the Roman Catholic priest craft is is a is of the writings of the ancient fathers and the Popes and it's superior to the scriptures and This is Father Bart Brewer's 12 years. As a matter of fact, he said one here, the Bible was a closed book to us. The library was off limits, except we had a special permission. And he says, in the Bible, we were not allowed to have our own personal copy of a Bible. So this is a priest in the seminary. So the traditions and the counsels and the decrees become superior to the writings of the Bible. We saw that in the true church, salvation is by Bible faith. Ephesians 2, 8 through 9, by grace are you saved through faith. It is not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. It is not of works, lest any man should boast. But we saw here that the false church now teaches water baptism. Now, all these things we're seeing, the mother church love, the magisterium, the traditions, the councils, the decrees, the water baptism, sanctification in the true church is by the scriptures and the Holy Spirit, as said in John 17 and 1 Peter 1. But the sanctification in the false church is through continued sacraments and good works. And so, all through that 175-year period, God was giving them space to repent. He would send up preachers to them, the Waldensies, the Patricians, the Paulikans. They were all given funny names. They were just basically simple Bible believers that would go into Alexandria, they would go into Carthage, they would go into Rome, and they would preach and tell the people to turn from these untoward ways. And yet they didn't repent, so God says in Revelation 2, verse 21, I gave her space to repent. She repented not. So verse 22, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds, and I will kill her children with death. And all the churches will know, shall know that I am He which searches the reins in the hearts, and will give unto every one of you according to your works. And you're either going to do the works of man and the devil and a false church, or you're going to do the works that are shown in the Scriptures as being led by the Holy Spirit. And God will reward you accordingly. Be not deceived, God is not mocked whatsoever man soweth. that shall he also reap. And so he warned them. He said, where's the verse? Verse 24, I say unto you and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not known this doctrine, which have not known the depths of Satan as they speak, I'll put none other burden on you. And what he permitted, what God permitted during this thousand year period of Thyatira is a gross darkness because they would not repent, the church at large, because they continued to have not just fornication physically, and many of the Pope's beds in the Vatican itself was a brothel full of harlots and concubines and prostitutes, but it was spiritual fornication, which is idolatry, And so the Lord brought upon them the depths of Satan in this period. We're going to study that for a little bit. Now, you know, in John chapter 8, verse 44, Jesus did say that to those religious leaders that were fighting him at his time, ye are of your father, the devil. And the thing that God wants us to understand as we go through the history of religion is religion is the devil's playpen. And any false religion, which is not the pure religion and the undefiled religion, which God gave here, which is to keep yourself unspotted from the world and to be separated under the gospel of Christ, anything else that calls itself religion, no matter what it calls itself, Christian or not, is a work of Satan. And Satan is a murderer. a liar and that's what he says in 844 and not only that he says in Matthew chapter 12 Jesus said every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation and verse 26 and if satan cast out satan he is divided against himself how then shall his kingdom stand and the story of the bible one of the sub themes of the story of the bible I mean, the main theme is God and Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, and the work that He does with men to bring them to salvation. But a sub-theme is the fact that Jesus, beyond being the Redeemer, is the King. And as the King, He has a kingdom. And His enemy, the devil, has kingdoms too. And when Jesus was out in the wilderness, back in Matthew 4, the devil did say to him he showed him all the kingdoms of the world in verse eight and the glory of them and and in verse nine the devil said all these things will i give thee if that will fall down and worship me because the devil is the little god god of this world and the kingdoms of the world are under his sway and and jesus said you know what those kingdoms are divided and Here's what's going to happen in this time period. On page 12 that I gave you on the depths of Satan, you'll see the history. Now historically, as the Pergamos period ended around 500 and the Thyatira period began, the Roman Empire fell. And the old Roman Empire of the Caesars and Augustus and all of them, Nero, fell and it occurred in 476 A.D. when Flavius Odacer deposed Romulus Augustus, the final Roman Empire. Now the Roman Empire had great sway all over Europe and North Africa and a large part of the Middle East, and it maintained the unity that it had through its power, through its armed forces, its centurions, its military force, and violence. It kept people in line, not by love, but by fear. And I'll just stop for a minute, just teach you to think. By the way, ultimately, for unsafe people, that's what works. Unsafe people are ruled better by fear than by love. And, you know, love conquers all. Not exactly. Because the love of God, many people are never going to be saved by it. And so God, it says, through his power, he'll restrain the wrath of his enemies. And one day God's power and his might will bring them down, not his love. But anyways, they're using military force and violence. Now, when the empire of Rome fell, it dissolved into a bunch of little rump states, little tiny things, fiefdoms, and the main political system of Europe for the next thousand years was feudalism. And feudalism, they just, it was very simple times. There was really, the Roman Catholic Church had done everything it could to prevent people from learning truth. Now, truth is spiritual, first and foremost. Truth is like a light. Thy word is truth. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. Thy word is a light and a lamp. And so here's the Roman Catholic Church putting the bushel over the light. So there's no light getting into people's hearts or minds. And when there's no light, there's not only a lack of spiritual truth, it becomes a lack of social truth and scientific truth. And the thousand years were dark period. There was no scientific growth. There was no social growth. There was no industrial revolution, no agricultural revolution. They lived just like people did thousands of years before, just having a little farm and having their plow shares and their pruning hooks and just working the farm like ordinary peasants. clusters of people living off the land in little areas wherever the land could support some growth. And in every area, there was always one strong man, a local man of war, like a Nimrod. And that man became the lord or the baron in that particular territory. And he promised to protect the lives and the property of his subjects from invading marauders, riding on horses and stuff like that. And so feudalism, you can see there, there's three classes. There's the high class of the lords and the barons. They're the upper class. And they live in castles and manors, and they're the strong men. They live in luxury. And then they would have what's called vassals or tenants. And they would live on a parcel of land called a fief. So they would use the word fiefdoms rather than kingdoms. And the baron, he had a parcel of land, let's say, I was doing the math today, let's say he had a five mile by five mile region like Williamsville, a little area, maybe Lord William, and it's his little area there. He's got this five. Now there's 640 acres in a square mile. So you got 25 square miles at 16,000 acres. He's got now he can't keep that himself. So, so he takes these 16,000 acres. And what he does is he divides it up, let's say 100 acres each. So he's got 160 plots of 100 acres each. And then he goes out and he finds some vassals. And he'll grant to this vassal, there's this formal ceremony he would have, a commendation ceremony composed of an act of homage and an oath of fealty. And what happens is the Lord would take this individual and he'd say, I'm going to grant to you these hundred acres, see, and you're part of my fiefdom, you're part of my little area right here. and and you have this hundred acres and you can put a little house on it and and you can work it and you can get on a majority of the fruit of the labor that you put there and and a small part you pay to me and you also have to do one other thing you have to volunteer be willing to be in my army if we have Marauders than you as the head of household we all get together and we go fight and I'll be the leader and there and the homage and the Fealty was made between the two of them and he's given his hundred acres and he would do that So now he's got a hundred and sixty men each one of them with a hundred acres and he's got a small army of 160 people now one guy with his family a husband and a wife and four kids they can't manage a hundred acres and They need some help, too. So what they were allowed to do was to go out and get serfs or slaves. Now, a serf or a slave, he doesn't get nothing except he does what he can. He gets a little bit to eat, and the rest he gives to the vassal that's controlling that area. And so you've got the upper class of the lords and the barons, the middle class, maybe 160 of these guys who are tenants, and then a whole bunch of slaves. You might have 1,500 slaves with their families. And so you got a three-class setup. That's how it was set up in feudalism. Now, this feudalism was like all over Europe, little tiny fiefdoms all over the place. And the feudalism permitted two things to occur for this next 500 to 600 years. One of the things it permitted was the Roman Catholics to dominate Europe. They kind of behaved as a religious mafia controlling the area. Let me just get some of my notes here and what they were able to do. Because there's all these little guys having their little fiefdoms, You see, over the 175-year period where the popes should have been repenting, instead what they were doing is they were taking all the money they could get from the Roman Empire, they were taking all the pieces of property they could get, and they were consolidating a large organization throughout Europe with a centralized head. And the centralized head is the pope. And in such a social system, now with these fiefdoms all over and these little guys having a little place, you know, they'd always fight. There would be a battle between this baron and that baron. And so the Pope could use the old rule of divide and conquer. I could pick the guy I want, and I can pit one baron against another in a petty squabble, in a conflict, and no baron could gain enough territory or power base to resist the Pope. And so the Pope had control over the area. Now one of the things he had going for him is, during the time period, God being faithful and God is faithful What he had done was he said go ye into all and teach all nations And so his preachers were out preaching now the Pope was always trained to kill him and do what he could but but he couldn't stamp out the church the gates of hell couldn't prevail against it so in every area along would come a preacher and I want you to take a look at the other chart I gave you here, and look down at the lower part of it. And this is what begins to happen. The page says, Comparison of the True Church. Down at the bottom, on the left, you see when preaching, when evangelism is brought forth, there's only one or two responses. There's either godly sorrow or worldly sorrow. Now, if there's godly sorrow, it leads to repentance. And when they repent, what happens is they turn to God, they turn to his word, and God, in his faithfulness, sends a teacher, a pastor teacher, to teach them. And the next thing that happens after the godly sorrow and the salvation is Bible teaching. And then the Bible teaching leads to more evangelism. And then the more evangelism leads to true revival, and you get a revival in the area. Unless you're killing them off which the Pope was killing off as many as he could to stop revival But notice the other thing that happens when evangelism and preaching comes if there isn't godly sorrow upwards there becomes worldly sorrow and worldly sorrow You know they think about it and go that preachers making sense after all in their heart of hearts Remember no modern education no television No radio. No rock stars. Europe. 600 A.D. Along comes a preacher preaching God. You know what their heart says? There's a God. There's a God. There's no atheists. There's a God. But my response is almost all persuaded me to be a Christian and believe the Bible, but I think what I'd like to be is religious. Maybe a religious system will make me all right with God. There's a part inside of man that wants to be religious. That's why all over this planet where you go on every continent, you'll find religions of every shape and stripe and variety and form because men make religions. Genesis chapter 11, let us build us a tower that may reach to heaven that's in the heart of man. And so notice what happens, the evangelism in preaching, there's a worldly sorrow and there's a revival, but not of Bible, but of religion. And then with the religion, we're going to see what happens here is there's going to be philosophy, education, culture, and then finally debauchery, outright immorality. And that's going to take a few centuries. But here's what's happening. The preachers are out there. And the people are knowing there's a God, and they're hearing there's a God, and they're not being given a Bible. The Bibles are being burned. There's no local bookstores. You can't get a copy of one. And along comes a Roman Catholic Church and binds them into their false religious system. And the Pope, now has a great power over these people. The two powers that he used over a particular region, no matter where it was in Europe, is he had the power of excommunication and the power of the interdiction. Now, excommunication. Excommunication was practiced, and what it meant was, we can now exclude you from the sacraments, because with these people, They turned to religion and religion had been propped up initially by the Roman Empire and all these basilicas and churches are all over Europe and their organized system is in place and their priests are in place and what they've been learning is the way that you get your salvation is through water baptism. We see the false church over there on the right. The way we get sanctified and stay close to God is through our sacraments and our good works like taking the mass and the Eucharist. And if I excommunicate you, This is a fearful thing because all these people, dreadfully superstitious, afraid of God, that water baptism, baby sprinkling, and the continual partaking of the Eucharist were essential to getting to heaven. And if you excommunicated, my soul is going to literally be damned to hell if I'm excommunicated permanently. And so the pope had tremendous power over threatening excommunication to people. And the popes would constantly go around and hurl anathemas at particular regions. If a baron didn't do what the pope wanted him to do, he would throw an anathema at that particular region and close the church doors. And now the people couldn't get the mass anymore and their babies couldn't be sprinkled. And they'd uprise and they'd go to the baron and say, you know, our kids are going to hell because of you. And the baron would say to the Pope, what is it you want? And it was always money. And he could get what he wanted that way. And sometimes he wanted more than money. He wanted the baron to say, raise up an army and kill those Bible believers that are 20 miles away from there, those lollards and those Waldensies that are running around with the Bible. I want you to capture them. I want you to burn their Bibles and burn them at the stake and burn their houses down. And that's what he was able to do through the threat of excommunication. They would just throw around, they would damn everybody. They were throwing more anathemas and dams than confetti and popcorn. and people were afraid all over the place, and that's what they were doing, using fear to frighten people. The other thing they did was an interdiction, and an interdiction was where they would go to an area and all the priests would close all the doors of the cathedrals and cut off the sacraments from everybody, damning an entire region. And when that kind of thing like a Gregory VII interdicted the entire nation of Scotland in 1180, Innocent III interdicted the whole nation of France in 1211. Yeah. Well, she's saying good for them as a Bible believer, she's saying it. But if we tried that today in Buffalo alone, and shut all the doors, and knocked all the statues down, and stopped all the services, you'd have riots on your hands. There'd be people that couldn't handle it. Because people, like Paul said in Athens, they're too superstitious. They just don't understand. But these interdictions force the political rulers to do whatever the Pope wanted. And mostly the Pope wanted money, and he wanted armed forces to fight his battles for him. And so that's what happened. The Catholic Church was almost like a religious mafia that was involved in extortion and murder. And that's what was going on during that period of time there. And the other thing that they did was, I showed you the system here of the feudal system, and at the top were the lords and the barons that lived in the castles and the manors. There was one other portion of the upper class, the priests, that lived in the cathedrals. And the money and the taxes that came in not only supported the barons, it supported the priests in the cathedrals, yes. Oh, that was another thing they did, yes. During the battles, yes. With all this going on and this dictatorship keeping things well in hand through dividing and conquer, pitting baron against baron, using the weapons of the excommunication and the interdiction, The Pope could pretty much extort all the money or any military he wanted from any Lord, and they dictated to the barons when they could fight, when they were not allowed to fight, when there would be a ceasefire. There were two things they called. One was called the truce of God, and the other was called the peace of God. And the Pope would say when the truce of God would be. So if Christmas was coming up, all fighting stopped, and everybody did. They were afraid of offending God. And there would be a truce on Christmas, and there'd be a truce on Easter, and there'd be a truce on All Saints Day, and there'd be a truce on Bing Crosby Day, and there'd be, you know, whatever it was, they would just have a truce, so there'd be no fighting that went on at that time. And the truce of God, and the Pope would determine when the fighting was, and he also determined where the fighting was to occur. And if there was an area where he said, this is where the peace of God rests, you're not allowed to fight here. And so it was always wherever there was a monastery, a seminary, a cathedral, no one was allowed to fight there. And that was a piece of ground that was like a ghoul. It was off limits. You couldn't do anything on that piece of ground. By the way, that went on for years. That went on in 1944. Italy when we were trying to make our way through Italy a Patton's troop and the Germans had taken over Mount Cassino Abbey which was a Catholic stronghold and it was a big seminary Cathedral and they were stocking all kinds of weapons in there and We weren't going to touch it. I mean because the Pope said you can't touch it. We didn't bomb it We didn't touch it wouldn't do anything and so the superstition that goes on and lost people is a quite quite impressive But not only that, for the deaths of Satan, the feudalism not only permitted the Roman Catholic Church to dominate Europe, but it permitted one other thing too. It permitted Islam to make its move. because there were really no nations to fight it. There were just little tiny barons with their little pieces of land and their 140 or so warriors who weren't all that well armed. And so it allowed Islam to perpetuate its endless jihads and win battles as it spread westward from the Middle East using the sword and relentless bloodshed it came through Turkey. It came to the Isle of Cyprus, it came through Bulgaria, and Greece, and the island of Malta, and Romania, and Serbia, and Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, France, and what is far as Spain. And so the Muslims were able to get in there and make a mess too. Now this was partly also the judgment of God. Go to the book of Isaiah chapter 7. And so the depths of Satan, I mean, he lets Satan raise up his two armies, his religious Babylon, the Roman Catholic Church, and his religious Assyria, the Islams and the Muslims. And if you remember, in the Old Testament, when the nation of Israel would be attacked, there were two major forces that attacked it in the days of the United and Divided Kingdom. It was Assyria and Babylon. And Assyria was just like this bloody, monstrous, killing machine. And Babylon was more subtle. It had its high priests, its Chaldeans and everything. It had some power, too, but it was very wise and smart and rich. And Assyria was just a brutal killer. Isaiah 7, verse 17, and the Lord tells the Jewish people, the Lord shall bring upon thee and upon thy people and upon thy father's house days that have not come. He said great tribulation in Revelation 2. From the day that Ephraim departed from Judah. Who are you gonna bring on us? Even the king of Assyria. Now Ephraim represents the northern kingdom. And Judah is the one that has the temple. Picture of the Bible-believing Christians. And what did Ephraim, the northern kingdom, Israel, Roman Catholicism do? It departed from the Bible. It still kept the name Christian, just like Ephraim kept the name Israel, but it really was not Israel in heart. It was no longer an Israelite in deed. It was an Israel that was not circumcised in heart. And Roman Catholicism are Christians who don't have God's heart or God's Son in their heart. And so he says, I'm going to bring Assyrians, I'm going to bring the Islamites on you. Verse 19, they'll come and they'll rest all of them in the desolate valleys, in the holes, the rocks, the thorns, the bushes. He says later on in the eighth chapter, verse Eight about Assyria verse seven now therefore behold the Lord bringeth upon them the waters of the river Strong and many even the king of Assyria and all his glory and he'll come Over his channels go over the banks. He'll pass through Judah. He'll overflow. He'll go He'll reach even to the neck stretching out his wings and shall fill the breath of thy land O Emmanuel and the Muslims I mean they not only got Europe they got They got the holy places where the Bible first started. They got Syria, they got Antioch, they got Constantinople, they got the Byzantine Empire where the first Bibles were originally printed, and they got all that stuff. They just moved across there as marauding hordes of invaders. The entire false religion, yes. Assyria today would be Iran and Iraq. That would be the areas where it would be. Yeah, it'd be Muslims. It's a Muslim territory today. So here, from this all raised up during the period of Thyatira, the man, Mohammed, born in Mecca in 570, and this is the Thyatiran period, about 595, he was a merchant in charge of merchandise of a rich woman of the clan of Assad. He was 25, she was 40, and he married her because he obtained sufficient wealth by marrying her. and engaging in mercantile activity. I'm reading from the Britannica Encyclopedia from many years ago. And he was able to work his way into the upper parts of society. He adopted a habit of spending nights in a hill cave near Mecca. And at about the age of 40 years old, he claims he had a vision of a majestic being who he later identified as the angel Gabriel. And this marked the beginning of his career as the messenger of God or the prophet. And from this time, he would receive, at frequent intervals, revelations, verbal messages that he believed came directly from God. Sometimes these were kept in his memory and his followers, and sometimes they were written down. And after his death, they were collated in something called the Koran. Muhammad was a perturbed after receiving his visions, but his wife reassured him that this was really from God Occasionally he would have physical attendance like perspiring and and fits and people later scholars thought maybe he had epilepsy sometimes he would hear noises like a bell and He ran around, tried to gather sympathetic friends in Mecca. Some of them accepted his claim that he was a prophet, and he began preaching publicly at the age of 43. Most of his early followers were very weak. And his new religion, he called it Islam, which means submission to God. And the adherents of it were called Muslims, which means those who submit to God, though the Quran speaks of them, calls of them believers. I got a book here from a man that's... Now, if you want to study this out about the depths of Satan, And Islam, I left a couple of places for you to go. There's a Dr. Bill Warner that's done a lot of work. He's got a website called politicalislam.com. And you can watch his videos on YouTube. They're well-researched. Jihad versus the Crusades is a five-minute one that he has, and the 1400-Year Secret, which is about 45 minutes long. But this Mohammed, You know it didn't make any preparation to write a book The book was written after his death Muhammad couldn't see his death coming by the way compare that to Moses Moses knew he was going to die, and Moses finished all five books before his death. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. A prophet of God knows. Peter knew he was going to die. Paul knew he was going to die. God had told him, this is what's going to happen. Fear not. I'll be with thee. And they knew. They were not surprised by it. But Mohammed, this man, was an Arabian who hated Jews. They got a list of his wives. He had 22 different women that he married. I believe 16 of them. There's a list here. This is a scholarly book by Robert Morey and it lists the name of all of the women that he slept with. 16 were wives, 2 were concubines, 4 were neither wives nor concubines. They were just devout women who wanted to give themselves to satisfy his desires. Muhammad had two big desires in his life. One was money and the other was women. And and that's the way he lived his life, and that's a testament in many books I got the Britannica here got dr. Ruckman's book here. I've got the Maury's book here and dr. Warner will bring you some of this stuff the documentation is everywhere. It's so His harem was so vast that and presented in so many different writings by so many different scholars, it's impossible to deny it. One of his wives, he slept with an eight-year-old girl, which to me seems impossible, but that's what he did. He was a pervert, is what he is, and no doubt about it. He was a Jew-hating Arabian. The final utterances on his deathbed was, Lord, destroy the Jews and the Christians. Gabriel, come close to me. And then he died. Those were his last words. Nothing biblical about the man. Just another lost man, superstitious, believing an angel is giving a revelation, which we know from the Scriptures. If an angel appears, it is Satan appearing as an angel of light. It is not God's angels, the book of Colossians. says in the New Testament, God's angels are not allowed to appear. We have the scriptures. That's all we need for truth is the scriptures. So, the Koran is not an inspired book because it has no prophecies in it. The Bible has prophecies. The Koran had only one writer. So collusion was quite easy when one man writes a book. And yet the interesting thing is in the study here of this particular book, the Koran, Dr. Mori took some time to go through it, the structure of the Koran. He observed that if you compare it to the Bible, you can see immediately it's different. The Bible has poetical material, historical material, prophetical material, and the Quran contains very little. It's a jumbled, confused order of individual surahs. The ministry of Muhammad contained in the Quran is spread over a 20-year period, over two different times. The time he was in Mecca for the first 10 years of his life and the time he was in Medina the second 10 years of his life. And here the Encyclopedia Britannica goes on to tell us that after his wife died, he was asked to leave the local merchandile association because he was kind of nutty, and he was forced to flee to Medina. And so he left Mecca and he went up north to Medina. He only had about 10 followers at that time. And so what he did after five years, he began to become a military man and he began to lead raids against caravans that were on their way back to Mecca. And he did it for a couple of reasons. Again, he loved money. And one of the things he found was most successful was raiding the caravans of Jewish men because the Jewish men were very good at selling merchandise and their caravans usually had a lot of silver and gold. So they really, he began to raise an army of men and he taught them, and they're all mentioned here, the normal raids. They're listed here in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Let's see, one of the first ones was in March 624. He led 315 men on a raid. He attacked a caravan returning from Syria. It had lots of gold and silver on it, and then he raised a larger Muslim force, more hostile nomadic tribes, and it talks about the Battle of Uhud, the Battle of Medina, the way he went back and he sieged Mecca eventually, and he took over in military fashion. And the Britannica finally ends and says this, Muhammad's chief significance is that he was a founder of a state, and in his lifetime he created a federation of Arab tribes, and he also founded a religion. was basically a military man. And Dr. Bill Warner will show you that he tried preaching the first 10 years and got 10 followers. The next 10 years, he went to Medina and he'd learned, hey, you get a lot more with a sword than you do with the word. And by the way, theft really pays well. And so he learned that thing and he took over and he did a lot of stealing and he became a very powerful military man. And so this is a very good book. It's got the history of his wife and his wives and his writings and the Quran and a scientific examination of the Quran, which was most interesting because they took a bunch of scholars to go through it. and they found that it's not written in good Arabic, it has many, many grammatical errors, sentences which are incomplete, which are not fully intelligible, unfamiliar words, more than a hundred aberrations, And also sprinkled throughout it, there's Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Akkadian, Ethiopian, Persian, and phrases found like that. And most scholars admit, after looking at this book entirely, that it was written by a common man in a dialect of a man that lived in that area. It says, Muslims claim the Quran was handed down from heaven and Muhammad could not be its author. However, according to the Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, the study of scholars finds the Arabic sentence structure and the words in the Quran is in the dialect and the vocabulary of a man who was just a member of the Quraysh tribe living in the city of Mecca. The dialect, the vocabulary, and the content reflects the style of its author, Muhammad. His fingerprints can be seen on every page as a witness to the human origin of the book. And in the particular book, there's no salvation. There's no guarantee of salvation except if you're killing someone in a battle in the name of Allah, Allah Akbar, then you're guaranteed to go to heaven. That could stir up a lot of men with testosterone to go on thinking they're doing God a service when they're being deceived, superstitious men. And the other thing in the Koran is no one needs the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the atonement of sins. The salvation for a Mohammedan, as for the Catholics, the deaths of Satan, is by works. Fasting, praying, almsgiving. Later on when Martin Luther writes, and we'll read that in Chapter 3 of Revelation, he calls Mohammed the firstborn child of Satan. But then he went on somebody said well Mr.. Luther or Martin Luther who's worse Muhammad or the Pope and he said the Pope is worse And I'd agree because the Pope sends people to hell in the name of Jesus Christ and Muhammad sends them the hell name of Allah. Yes, I Sure, that explains suicide bombing. If you think by killing people and getting killed in battle is your one sure way to heaven, that would be an incentive if you're superstitious and lost and deceived and the God of this world, Satan, has blinded your mind from the true gospel and you've received a false gospel and another spirit. Yeah, it would do that for you. So in this particular period, what we see is feudalism allowed the Lord to do exactly what he said he was going to do. He was going to bring them to the depths of Satan, and he was going to kill their children. And not only did he use Roman Catholic armies, killing, and we didn't look at the Crusades yet, and we'll look at that next week, and the Inquisition. But he used the Muslims going around with the sword, and God also used the Black Plague to wipe out 30 to 40 percent of Europe. Like he said, I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know I am He which searcheth the reins and the hearts. And the people with Bibles could see this is the hand of God. and they would go out and try and preach to people that God's hand is heavy upon us. We need to repent, we need to believe the gospel, we need to get right. And thankfully we're going to see at the end of this period there's going to be a turn in the Renaissance and the Reformation and Tyndale and Wycliffe and Luther and John Huss are going to go forth preaching the Bible and there's going to be a rebirth of Bible and the printing press is gonna come forth. But in the meantime, you can see that the Lord is bringing this to pass, just as he said here. How are we on time? Okay, so we're just about out of time. So next week, I wanna take us and see some of the other things that the Roman Catholics did. The sad thing that occurred during this period of time is the Bible believers were always persecuted. Now, it is true that the Muslims would fight the Catholics, and the Catholics would fight the Muslims, but they both would kill Bible believers. And the one thing that was really upsetting to the Pope was a Bible believer, and we'll see next week as we look at the debauchery inside the Roman Catholic Church from the Pope through the cardinals and the bishops and all the way down to the priests and all the things that were going on is the one thing that would get a Pope to the point where he would excommunicate or kill someone would be a Bible believing. Priests could commit all kinds of sins. They could commit theft. They could adultery. They could commit works with little boys. They could do anything, and they may be shuffled about. They may be given a slap on the wrist. But if one of them ever stood up, Against the papal system and said this is wrong that we must believe the Bible at that point they were called heretics and they were branded for death and that was the one thing that brought the sentence of death was was Bible believing Sad but true, I guess none that things haven't changed. Yes, brother. I That's about all they had, brother. Let me see, I want to look at the Epistle of Jude. Yeah, he basically called it, I gave diligence to write you of the common salvation to contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. What the Lord commended to them was the written pieces of a scripture. I've got a book at home by Floyd Nolan Jones on the Bible issue, and he observed that, you know, you got a little church, okay? A small assembly starts in someone's house. Someone has just come from an area where there was a Bible preacher. Maybe they heard Paul, and maybe they heard one of Paul's disciples. And so they've heard. And before they left, they would very carefully, the best they could, on a papyrus fragment, copy a tract with some of the best verses that they could get out of that epistle and bring it back to that area. And then they would be able to read the words plainly and clearly to the people. and the people would pray, and they would, if possible, make another trip and get a few more pages of Bible, and they have just pages of Scriptures, and nobody had like a complete book like we had. They could get whatever they could get their hands on, and they were thankful for it, and they rejoiced at every little piece of the Word of God they could get. Remember, the Bible's big, it's the Word of Truth, but within the Word of Truth is the Word of the Gospel. It doesn't take more than 20 verses to get that thing. And they'd get the word of the gospel. They'd get the gospel in their heart. They would be regenerated. They'd have a new spirit. And that new spirit taught them to live. They have a new conscience, you know, a sharpened conscience. It's not dull anymore. They've been regenerated. God can work through their conscience. God can work with them in their life. God could work with them in prayer. God and whatever little Bible God could get to them. He would and that's what they went with papyrus Fragments, they've been found all over Europe little fragments of a bit there and a bit here and a bit there Little pieces of Bible. That's all they had. They didn't have a printing press. Yes What does that mean? Oh, they were in all different languages. God had them by the second century. There was a Bible in Latin. There was a Bible in Syriac. There was a Bible in Egyptian. I mean, not the whole thing, but yes, God, through the gift of tongues, what he had done verbally, Acts chapter 2 he was allowing them to do literally within the written form to take that about God Wanted his witness and his word to go to the ends of the earth and he committed it to his saints not to scholars Simple people and they believed they were holding God's Word. They were very reverent and and awestruck by it and they trembled at it, they would never change or alter or add or subtract. They took it exactly from whatever little assembly they got it and then brought it to the next assembly and that's how they did it. Yeah, faithfully. Yes, so what you're, okay, when you said killing, you don't mean literally, what you're meaning is that, okay, yes, there is no doubt that Paul, in a number of epistles, whether it be the same one that talks about Satan as an angel of light, which would be 2 Corinthians 11, he says, if someone comes and preaches another Jesus, or another gospel, then that thing is going to frustrate the grace of God from you. There's only one Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible, and there's only one gospel. It's the gospel of Jesus' salvation, plus nothing and minus nothing. So yes, I mean, a false church that is preaching a different authority, a different doctrine, a different salvation, a different sanctification, yes, if you grow up a faithful Catholic and believe that teaching, yes, you'll be damned to hell. So, I mean, it's pretty certain that, you know, when Mother Teresa died, you know, somebody said, is she in hell? Well, is she a Catholic? Does she believe the Catholic religion? then yes, she's in hell. Because the question is, where do you place your faith? Where is your faith? Jesus asked the men one day. Where is your faith? If your faith is like a deposit, like money in your pocket, and you've got to deposit it in a bank, which bank have you put it in? Have you put it into the Bible bank that tells about Jesus, the Savior, the Redeemer, all-encompassing, plus nothing or minus nothing? or if you put it in a bank that says Romanism, water baptism, and sacraments, and the mass, or you put it in a Presbyterian, or an Anglican, or any other form, and you put it in that, then your faith is in the wrong place. God's going to bankrupt all those religions, and your faith goes with it, and so does your soul. It has to be in the right place. And it doesn't matter how much you deposit. You could have a million dollars of faith in a Catholic church, and this guy's got two pennies in Christ, just the faith of a mustard seed. That guy's going to heaven, and that guy with a million dollars is going to hell, because this thing's going bankrupt. It's busting flat out at the judgment seat of Christ and at the white throne, yeah.