Music Music Music From 1203 to 1805, 50 million Christians died Suffering at the hands of Rome, cause they believed They died through Europe, especially Spain For they saw all but Christ in vain He suffered by His death a man To save them from their awful sin Six hundred years of martyred saints That history cannot erase With iron heel and iron hand, the Roman Poles Ooverland, those ignorant of history May be swept into apostasy We won't be loved by Rome, sweet lie With fifty million reasons why Salvation is thy faith alone In Christ alone, thy grace alone A sovereign God give faith to man Salvation's in the maker's hand This gospel upends Rome today They offer up another way A counterfeit, a compromise Beware the ancient papal lies was such a cloud of witnesses who by grace died in their Lord. Recall their memory to say, by the same faith we live today. Today, most people have some knowledge of the Holocaust of World War II, those six years of unspeakable horror and suffering that the Jewish people were subjected to under Hitler and the Nazi regime. Few, however, are aware of the facts about an earlier atrocity, the Inquisition, the 605 years of torture and murder that was inflicted on Bible-believing Christians because they refused to compromise their faith. The Holocaust, which was an unspeakable event in terms of its horror and suffering against the Jewish people, in which six million people were put to death, literally liquidated, The Inquisition, which is a term much forgotten or not known to most people, certainly the younger generation, occupied a much, much longer period, more than six centuries of, again, unspeakable torture and slaughter. of not only Bible-believing Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Knights Templars, and those which they called witches. It involved tens of millions of people, possibly as many as 50 million, according to reputable and trustworthy historians. Many people were not even aware of the term Inquisition. It is that period of 605 years where the Church of Rome, in a methodical, organized way, tortured by believers and others so that they would give up their faith and trust in Mother Church and not submit to a personal faith in Christ Jesus alone by His grace. The Roman Catholic Church began the practice of suppressing heresy long before the 12th century. To the Roman Church, anything that did not agree with their system of religion was a heresy and must be suppressed. However, before the 12th century, those so-called heretics were typically individual street preachers or small groups of Bible believers meeting together in various locations and scattered throughout the land. Consequently, the church had no structured system for the suppression of heresy. The process was sporadic and slow. There was no real pattern or standard method for dealing with the heresy or the heretics, but that was about to change. In the 12th century, a phenomenon occurred. the likes of which the Catholic Church had not dealt with in the past. In southern France, scores of people were becoming Bible believers. Groups like the Albigensians were rapidly spreading throughout the region. This heresy, as the Roman Catholic Church called it, was growing at an alarming rate. If the Catholic Church was going to suppress this heresy, it clearly needed a new and systematic method of dealing with heretics. That new method came with Pope Innocent III, With the army of the Crusades at his disposal, and offering land to all who would come and fight this heretical movement in southern France, Innocent III was determined to suppress this growing menace of Bible believers, and he would begin with the Albigensies. The Inquisition actually, if we wanted to put a date on it, began in France, an interesting group of people called the Albigensians. The Albigensians were a remarkable people and with remarkable civilisation, culture and moral good standing and good lives and they had cultivated a wonderful agricultural life based on the biblical principles, and they had many cities across France. Albi is one of the cities even there to this day. Of course, it's not Bible-reading anymore, because the way in which they were obliterated was in brutal torture and in the loss of life, and this was really the beginning of the Inquisition, under the Pope called Innocent III. He was the one who, building on the legal rights of Rome, to be not just a religious power, but a civil power, going back to such as Hildegrand and the famous Gregory VII, He brought the paper power to a zenith or a climax when he turned what had been the armies of the crusade now against Bible believers. and it wasn't just that their cities were devastated and overrun with blood and they lost their lives and the actual fall of some of these cities and historians like Wiley is a really difficult history to read but their very name has been tarnished the Roman Catholics make out as if they were somehow mannequins holding for a dualism between the body and the flesh where in actual fact you can trace the origins back most likely to the politicians who were those who went back to the faith of Paul as it is written in the scripture and when you see how remarkable their lives were and the authenticity of their lives and the morality of their lives, obviously they believe in the true gospel of Christ Jesus and not in the Judaism. But it's not just that their cities are wiped out, but even the very history has been darkened as it were. This suppression was not limited to the Albigensies or to southern France. The powerful arm of the Pope reached into other nations and regions where the Catholic Church had a presence. Other groups, like the Vaudois or Waldensians, also suffered terrible persecution for their faith. The Vaudois are an interesting group of believers because they go right back to apostolic times, and to the writings of the apostles in the New Testament, of course, to the Old Testament scriptures, and they had a great love for the scripture as the truth, and they believed in Christ Jesus alone, faith alone and grace alone. We have wonderful accounts of these by believers such as John Paul Perrin's book on the Vaudois and Peter Alexander's and many others. It is wonderful to see the faith of these men and women and to know that they stood strongly. The Edmund Valley, this was one of the valleys that was overrun at different times by the troops that were sent out to slaughter and massacre the believers in these valleys, that's where they got the name from, Val-d'Oire Valley, these valley people in Northern Italy and in Southern France. Thus began the development of a structured method of dealing with heresy and heretics wherever it might be found. Councils of bishops and archbishops acting under the authority of the Pope became known as the Holy Office of Inquisition into Heretical Wickedness. The method that Innocent III began was continued by successive Popes as they devised more horrific means and methods to try and suppress those who disagreed with the Roman Catholic Church. Innocent IV was the one who brought in the actual details of how torture was to be done. There was a pope who devised these tortures and there was going to be 75 popes in a row that added to these different types of tortures. Several reputable historians have commented on the Roman Catholic atrocities during the Inquisition. And even the Roman Catholic historians speak about the horrors of the Inquisition. Men like Peter de Rosa. Peter de Rosa wrote a book, the Vickers of Christ book, The Dark Side of the Papacy was the other title for it. And it speaks of the Pope's presumed primacy reigning over all the Church, and the arrogance of papal power. And I quote from it, John Paul presents the papacy as the champion of truth and the rights of man. He takes it for granted that popes have never contradicted one another on essentials or deviated from gospel truth. History explodes the myth of a papacy lily-white in the matter of truth. In an age of barbarism, the popes led the pack. In an age of enlightenment, they trailed the field. and their record was worst when, contrary to the Gospel, they tried to impose their truth by force. And Peter de Rosa, in a separate part of the book, also wrote of the atrocities of the torture machine that you just mentioned, of the Roman Catholic Church. He writes, the record of the Inquisition would be embarrassing for any organisation For the Catholic Church it is devastating. Today it prides itself, and with much justification, on being the defender of natural law and the rights of man. The papacy in particular likes to see itself as the champion of morality. What history shows, however, is that for more than these six centuries, without a break, the papacy was the sworn enemy of elementary justice. 80 popes in a line from the 13th century on, not one of them, among them, disapproved of the theology and apparatus of the Inquisition. on the contrary, one after another, each added his own cruel touches to the working of this deadly machine. In the Bible, the Holy Spirit foretold her lust for power and for blood, and history has recorded some of the gruesome details of that. And the second Roman Catholic historian that I can quote from is Lord Acton, who is made famous for his observation, with the mother Roman Catholic Church firmly in mind, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He says about the Inquisition that the Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the Popes. It stands out from all those things in which they cooperated, followed or assented as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. It was set up, renewed and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from the supreme authority of the Church No other institution, no doctrine, no teaching, no ceremony is so distinctly the individual creation of the papacy, except the dispensing path. It's the principal thing with which the papacy is identified and by which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition is the Pope's sovereign power over life and death. Whoever disobeys him should be tried and tortured and burnt. If that cannot be done, formalities may be dispensed with and the culprit may be killed like an outlaw. That is to say, the principle of the Inquisition is murderous. And the man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion of religious assassination. So did the English Lord Acton, Roman Catholic, write. The Roman Catholic Church was not satisfied to put the heretics to death in a humane manner. They continued to devise more horrific tortures in their attempt to make the so-called heretics renounce their faith and accept Roman Catholicism. things like the Judas Chair. The Judas Chair was used in the Spanish Inquisition in particular. It was a pyramid-type seat. The victim was lowered down on this seat so that the pointed end of the Judas Seat, which was this pyramid, penetrated the orifices of both male and female so that They suffered excruciating pain and there was hope that they would renounce their Biblical faith and proclaim their faith in Holy Mother Church. This is just one example. Other Bible believers were burned at the stake. Burning at the stake was often carried out in front of a large crowd and an auto-defay, an occasion of dramatic pomp and festivity. Those who were burnt at the stake were very often those, of course, who were called heretics, whose faith and biblical convictions carried the most threat to the papacy. And it was almost as if the Roman church believed that by burning them, both their bodies and their beliefs would disappear into the cinders together. And in England, at the time of the English Reformation in the 16th century and during the reign of Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, who became known as Bloody Mary, she was a fervent Catholic, beholden to the Pope, who brought in the Inquisition to cause the martyrdom of some 288 Protestant martyrs in England. Most of them died because they denied the real presence. The real presence being Catholic dogma or doctrine or teaching that Jesus Christ is really present, body, soul, divinity and humanity in the sacrament. The burning back-to-back of Bishops Latham and Ridley, which took place in Oxford outside Balliol College in 1555, is still well known to many people as are Latimer's stirring last words, which were an inspiration for centuries to Bible-believing Christians in the English-speaking world mainly. And his words were, Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man We shall this day, by God's grace, light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put out. The rack was another instrument used by the Inquisition. The rack, which was quite famous for the horrors that it brought upon the victims. The victim was made to be stretched out on a rack whereby cords pulled from one side, their arms and their legs from the other side, so that the body began to dislocate, so that in the agony and pain of being pulled on the rack, the Bible believer would submit to the Church of Rome. Another method of imposing horrific pain to the joints was to raise the victim toward the ceiling by ropes. and then with weights tied to the ankles the victim was dropped almost to the floor before coming to a jarring stop that sent horrendous pain ripping through the body. The skull crusher was yet another means the Inquisition used to urge repentance. The skull crusher, one of these medieval torture machines whereby the believer's chin was placed on the lower bar and the screw then forced the cap down on his head or her head. The teeth were crushed and smashed and the eyes were squeezed from their sockets. It was hoped that as they were going through this torture that they would submit and give up their personal faith and believe in the faith in the system, the system being the Catholic Church. The Iron Maiden or Iron Virgin as it was also called is yet another of the Inquisition's horrors. the Iron Virgin, and it was a tomb-sized container with folding doors, and at the touch of a spring the spiked, studded arms would wrap around the body of the victim in such a way as to puncture parts of the entire body, including the eyes and the ears. The purpose obviously was to inflict pain but by means of a slow death, vicious spikes into the body and a slow death. The Roman Catholic Church learned that they could completely remove the skin from a person all the way down to their waist before the person would die. They also had several other ways and instruments to tear and mutilate the flesh of their victims. Another way of slowly being upon death was the different ways that the Catholic Church used to tear the flesh of men and women and even children. These implements of torture of whips and saws and different claws by which they tore into the human flesh. It wasn't just that they did this over the body in general, it was often done in particular on the genitals. men and women, so by they could inflict the greatest pain at the most sensitive areas of the body, particularly the genital organs of both sexes. Sometimes these things were heated to make them even worse. The Inquisitors also had devised several methods to crush the bones of those who refused to repent. Instruments for compressing the fingers till the bones would be squeezed with splinters. They were instruments for probing below the fingernails, so that an exquisite pain like a burning fire would run along the nerves. And they were instruments for tearing out the tongue, scooping out the eyes, rooting out the ears. and there was a bunch of iron cords with a spiked circle at the end of every whip for tearing the flesh from the back till bone and sinew were laid bare. There were iron cases for the legs which were tightened upon the limb placed in them by means of a screw till the flesh and bone were reduced to a pulp. Thumb screws were also applied, apart from for thumbs, to prisoners' toes, while larger, heavier devices, based on the same design principle, were applied to destroy knees and elbows. Another set of instruments were used by the Inquisition to pierce the body, such as a chair of nails. this chair of nails was so that the victim would be placed on this and then with mallets would be hit down on it to make sure that the nails really did their work of puncturing the body with exquisite pain and they Fire was lit under the chair of males so that the heresy of trusting in Christ alone by faith alone and grace alone would be given up or the so-called heresy that is biblical faith and people would trust in Holy Mother Church. There were also devices to slowly and painfully remove the intestines and other organs from the body while keeping the person alive and conscious of the pain. Any one of those horrors could be inflicted on anybody man, woman or child over the age of 12 that did not agree with the Roman Catholic Church. And the trials were not conducted in a democratic or fair manner. Anyone could be arrested by the Inquisition on suspicion. And then the trial was secret. The prisoner wasn't allowed to know the accusers or the witnesses. And the judges were the priesthood. They were ecclesiastics with absolute power. and discretion. The evidence of infamous persons, of criminals, perjurers or heretics was admitted so long as it was hostile. When I use the word heretic there, I'm not referring to true believers. Children from the age of 12 were required to bear testimony. The prisoner didn't have the help of an advocate. For anyone defending a heretic was held guilty of the crime of furthering heresy. And it's worth mentioning that the Inquisition was consistently carried out in European countries, France, Germany, Holland, Spain and Italy. Those people were subjected to horrendous suffering and yet they continued to be steadfast in their faith and were able to derive the strength and courage to face those atrocities. Well it was a wonderful demonstration of the grace and divine power of the Lord Jesus Christ in whom they believed so firmly that carried them through and enabled them to survive the ordeal which today we can hardly begin to contemplate, that we could deal with. Many of the afflictions of the righteous, and the Lord delivereth them out of them all, they remembered that the Lord had said in the Gospel, be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. And also I say unto you, whosoever shall confess me before men, that him shall the Son of Man also confess before the angels of God. And again, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. They not only knew who the Christ was, but very clearly they knew who the Antichrist was. And they came back to scripture texts, and this is quoted by Vaudois and others throughout the years of the Inquisition, whereby they saw clearly that the scriptures proclaimed who the Christ was and who the Antichrist was and they were upheld in their faith because they knew that the scriptures had foretold that these sufferings would come upon believers Christ Jesus talked about many Christs coming and that we were not to believe and that many people claimed to be the Christ Peter talked about many false teachers, the Apostle Paul talked about wolves coming in the midst of the flock of the Lord and it was always the many and the few who would stand strong. So they were warned and they took great cognizance of the fact that they were coming under the woman spoken about in Revelation 17. They knew that Revelation 17 said, the words, Mystery Babylon the great mother of harlots, drunken with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Revelation chapter 17 and verse 6. They realized that the papal system was the one that was doing these things and that they were to stand strong in the faith because this was what was prophesied and they saw that she indeed was great because she had brought in princes and kings and queens to do her work and that she indeed was mystery because she was proclaiming a message that was unknown to the pages of scripture except that it had been prophesied that such horrors would come, an apostasy from the true gospel. It is sad that many Bible believers of our own day will say that they know who the Christ is but they do not know who the Antichrist is. It is proclaimed in 2 Thessalonians 2 as both a system and a person. The man of sin and the one who would sit in the temple of God calling himself God and the only one in the pages of history who has done this is the Pope. To this day the Pope calls himself the Holy Father which is the title of God and he calls himself the Vicar of Christ which is the title of the Holy Spirit so he sits in the Temple of God calling himself God now the Bible believers saw these things and they saw that it was historically true unlike many Bible believers of our own day who say they do not know who the Antichrist is and they are looking for some something to come in future times whereby they will get implanted with a computer chip or something in their brain or some other of these wild ideas that go around whereby in the pages of scripture we see these things prophesied and we see it fulfilled and a problem for the church today is that we ignore history at our peril In those days the cardinals wore scarlet and the bishops purple and to this day the Roman church still boasts these two colours. I remember when I was a priest in Rome in 1963 going into 1964 and I went to Vatican Council 2 as it was in session and I saw the square filling up with 3000 prelates pouring into the square after one of the sessions of the council and I saw that the colours were scarlet and purple and I was taken aback because even as a Catholic priest I knew what Revelation said and this is real and this is the real colors of Rome and this is what was prophesied of her and that's only one of the details she holds the golden cup she is the only system that has done the blood of the saints over such a long period of time this is fact it is not something that is surmised this can be verified on the pages of history The Roman Catholic Church today still maintains the canon laws that she used as her authority to torture and murder Bible believers for over 600 years. and it is not just that she held these things in the past she still holds in the present day teachings that you must submit to her and she says that she has the right to coerce Christian people this is in modern canon law in canon 1311 quotation the church has an innate and proper right to coerce offending members of the Christian faithful by means of papal sanctions." The Catholic Church also holds to the fact that she can demand a submission of intellect and will. Now we know that submission of intellect and will is usually a hallmark of a cult. and we wouldn't expect that the church that holds itself to be a true Bible or true church would in any way in its writings hold to this but she does in fact in the famous canon 752 She says the following, quotation, a religious respect of intellect and will, even if not the ascent of faith, is to be paid through the teaching of the supreme pontiff or college of bishops. enunciate on faith and morals, which the Supreme Pontiff or College of Bishops enunciate on faith and morals. So what the Supreme Pontiff or Supreme Mediator says or his College of Bishops on faith and morals you have to submit your intellect and will. And this is the same teaching, it is not upheld with the rigors of the past or there are no sanctions like the past, but the same mindset is there and I think that we have to see that and we have to realize that Bible believers were fortified they saw what the apostle Peter said kept by the power of God and they were kept by the power of God and their faith resounded at that time before the throne of God and it still resounds on the pages of history for those who dare read the true historical accounts Why would the church that claims to be a humanitarian loving organization continue to write those canons into her modern law? Could it be that the Roman Catholic Church is still using those laws and maintaining that same mindset in our day and age? It's certainly among the best kept secrets of the history of the 20th century that an Inquisition which was as severe as in previous centuries that we've been discussing did take place at the time of the Second World War. Just to give you a little background first, in 1929 Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Pope of the time, Pope Pius XI, officially conceding Vatican Hill to the Pope. In other words, the Vatican to be set up again as a political entity. And the papacy once again became a sovereign civil state. The legal agreement with Mussolini was just the beginning of the Concordat. Concordats that were to be established with many nations, perhaps the most infamous being the one between Pope Pius XII and Adolf Hitler. The Vatican formed alliances with the following Roman Catholic dictators, among others, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal, Juan Perón in Argentina, but the most brutal and bloodthirsty of all of them was Anton Pavelich in Croatia. According to a memorandum in the documents of the United States Army's Counterintelligence Corps, dated the 12th of September 1947, agents hunting escaped Nazi war criminals after World War II purposely avoided capturing one man because, to quote the document, his contacts are so high and his present position so compromising to the Vatican that any extradition of the subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church. The man was Anton Pavelic, head of the new nation state of Croatia, carved out of Yugoslavia during the war. During Pavelic's four-year reign, he and Roman Catholic prelate, Archbishop Alois Stepinac, pursued a convert or die policy among the 900,000 approximately Greek, Orthodox, Serbs, Jews and others in Croatia. 200,000 were converted. 700,000 who chose to die were tortured, burned, buried alive or shot after digging their own graves. This appalling persecution was carried out by the Ustashis. They included many of the worst atrocities of the whole Second World War. Certainly the mutilations were horrific and the savagery was terrible. The Catholic Church did not leave the execution of a religious war to the secular arm on this occasion. She was there herself, openly ignoring precautions and bolder than she had been for a very long time. Wielding the hatchet or dagger, pulling the trigger, organising the massacre, the Roman Catholic priesthood became again its own instrument of inquisition. Many of the Eustachia officers were priests or friars who was sworn to fight with dagger or gun for the triumph of Christ and Croatia. Priests played a prominent role in the closing or takeover of the Serbian Orthodox churches, the seizure of church records and the interrogation of the Serbian Orthodox clergy as well. They also supervised the concentration camps and organise the torture of many of the victims. And this is all happening in the 20th century. French author Edmond Paris, who was born a Roman Catholic, has written a very thorough account of this terrible massacre in his book Convert or Die, and he wrote, it's difficult for the world to believe that the whole people could be doomed to extermination by a government and religious hierarchy of the 20th century. just because it happened to belong to another ethnical and racial group and had inherited the Christianity of the Byzantium kind instead of the Roman kind. The world does not in fact know and is thus unable to understand fully all this background in the Second World War to what happened in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia after the Vatican, note the Vatican, led Western nations in recognizing Croatia as an independent sovereign state. and of course immediately hostilities broke out between the Croats and the Serbs given this background of what took place in the Second World War. British historian and journalist Andrew Roberts of the Sunday Telegraph expressed surprise in that newspaper He wrote, in the present crisis almost the entire western media have chosen to champion the Croats. He goes on to ask the question, how are the Serbs expected to react to the decision to adopt the Ustashe's chequered symbol as the Croatian national flag? In Krajina it takes longer than the 45 minute attention span of today's CNN broadcaster to forget the way Franciscan friars participated in the slaughter of Serbs in Croatian Bosnia. Orthodox Serbs were promised protection if they converted to Catholicism but were then killed after they entered the churches as the priests looked on. The attempt during the Second World War to create the entirely Roman Catholic independent state of Croatia was accompanied by a persecution so ferocious that it is difficult to find a parallel in all of history. The Inquisition applied to the Serbian Orthodox by the Croatian Catholics accounted for 700,000 Serbs tortured and killed in just four years and of course we have that state that they wanted in Croatia now. In the year 2000, the Pope asked for forgiveness for the part that the members of the Church played in the Inquisition. I remember the time well. It was March in the year 2000. The Pope asked for forgiveness for the acts of the members of the Church. that they had done in the service of church. Now it wasn't the members of the church or individual members of the church who did these things. It was the papacy itself and the popes in particular. Peter De Rosa has said 80 popes in a row. In my study of going through one after another of popes in the past, as I have studied history, I have seen that I can document at least 75 popes in a row who have upheld torture. and this is historical fact, it was the popes that gave the authority as we saw, Lord Acton said it was primarily an institution of papal rule even under Isabel and Ferdinand in Spain under the famous Spanish inquisition it was still under the papal inquisitors that the authority came and that the devices of the tortures were given by Papal Rome. So for the Pope to apologise that it was somehow members of the Church, this is a total mock apology because it was Papal Rome that did the horrific deeds for all these centuries and Papal Rome has not apologised. and the same remains and the same doctrines that they held then, they hold today. They hold through salvation, through sacramental system as they did at the time of the Inquisition and they still hold to a type of sacramentalism by which a person looks to the communion bread that it can sanctify you. It is not any physical thing that sanctifies. It is the righteousness of Christ Jesus received by faith under the conviction of the Holy Spirit by which a person becomes a Bible believer. As the Roman Catholic Church continues to embrace the increasingly popular ecumenical movement across the world, it would be wise for all of us, and especially Bible believers, to remember the lessons of history and to remain steadfast in our faith. Now, what happened to the faith of believers in those times? The faith of believers stood strong. They knew that Christ Jesus had said that he would be with them. They knew that Christ Jesus promised to be with them all days, even until the end of the world. They knew that Christ Jesus was with them in the power of the Holy Spirit, that they could withstand the suffering that they were going through it is not just that Christ Jesus who is the judge of all will finally one day judge them that he will and he will bring into light all the horrors of the past but Christ Jesus was even in those years triumphing in the gospel and in the glorious faith of these men and women and sometimes even children suffering for their faith. They died because of their faith in Christ alone. They trusted in Christ alone and in his glorious gospel alone and they withstood the torture to die for the true faith and in that way Christ Jesus was gloriously reigning as it says in Psalm 2 and he was holding in derision those who were trying to break apart his kingdom he held them in derision and they were triumphant even then look at the same Christ Jesus who at the cross suffered the most ignominious death one could ever imagine and what looked to be the greatest of all failures turned out to be the greatest triumph in his sacrifice in the place of believers and his righteousness credited to them and in the same way through all those horrible years He was triumphing in the faith of believers. Now, Rome has not just given up, she has given up the actions, the physical tortures, but she still has the same mindset as we gave from some of her canon laws of the present day. And she still draws many onto a bosom. But we are not to be afraid. Christ Jesus talked about the little flock. He told us that there would be few that would stand, but they would stand by His power. And so we know the true gospel is not numerical. It is brilliantly true that Christ Jesus has given His life, the one for the many, as you trust on Him and Him alone. It is to look to Christ Jesus and Him alone for faith and recognize that you are destitute of anything spiritually and to trust on Him and to share in that same victory of faith. that was demonstrated through all those years before the throne of God and will be seen for all eternity. We need to remember that so many of them, especially in my country in England, had come out from the Roman Catholic Church and had been converted wonderfully to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And they were comforted, as people really mentioned, by the scriptures, by scriptures like, all who walk godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. And they had heeded the injunction of scripture from Revelation 17 and 18. Revelation 18, come out of her my people that you be not partakers of her sins and that you receive not of her plagues. and they had been obedient and they knew that the Lord had called them out and that gave them the strength and the fortitude and the perseverance that is so much the calling of all who would place their faith and trust their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ. trust on the same Lord Jesus Christ and know the same joy that they knew and the joy that will be for all eternity as we give praise to the glory of his grace and his person and we thank God for the remarkable faith of all those men and women. And to God be glory, praise, worship and honor, now and forevermore. Amen and Amen. It involved tens of millions of people, possibly as many as 50 million. They not only knew who the Christ was, but very certainly they knew who the Antichrist was. In an age of barbarism, the popes led the cart. In an age of enlightenment, they trailed the field. Trust on the same Lord Jesus Christ and know the same joy that they knew. And a problem for the church today is that we ignore history at our peril. This Reformation audio track is a production of Stillwater's Revival Books. SWRB makes thousands of classic Reformation resources available, free and for sale, in audio, video and printed formats. Our many free resources, as well as our complete mail-order catalogue, Thank you. at SWRB at SWRB.com by phone at 780-450-3730 by fax at 780-468-1096 or by mail at 4710-37A Avenue Edmonton that's E-D-M-O-N-T-O-N Alberta abbreviated capital A capital B Canada T6L3T5. You may also request a free printed catalog. And remember that John Calvin, in defending the Reformation's regulative principle of worship, or what is sometimes called the scriptural law of worship, commenting on the words of God, which I commanded them not, neither came into my heart, from his commentary on Jeremiah 731, writes, God here cuts off from men every occasion for making evasions. Since he condemns by this one phrase, I have not commanded them, whatever the Jews devised. There is then no other argument needed to condemn superstitions than that they are not commanded by God. For when men allow themselves to worship God according to their own fancies, and attend not to His commands, they pervert true religion. And if this principle was adopted by the Papists, all those fictitious modes of worship in which they absurdly exercise themselves, would fall to the ground. It is indeed a horrible thing for the Papists to seek to discharge their duties towards God by performing their own superstitions. There is an immense number of them, as it is well known, and as it manifestly appears. Were they to admit this principle, that we cannot rightly worship God except by obeying His word, they would be delivered from their deep abyss of error. The Prophet's words, then, are very important, when he says that God had commanded no such thing, and that it never came to his mind, as though he had said that men assume too much wisdom when they devise what he never required, nay, what he never knew.