We are moving into the fourth century this week. That would be 301 to 400 AD. And I've titled this one Empires and Councils. If we have time at the end, we'll go through some of the points on the notes I've given you. There's even a back this week. Lots to potentially talk about. But we're going to jump pretty quick into a couple detailed points here in the fourth century. All right, so as we move into this fourth century, something pretty significant is going to happen to the church. It's going to change the course of the church. We saw last century quite a bit of persecution, the first empire wide persecution and some splits in the church and we're going to see the opposite of that in this century because the Roman Emperor Constantine is going to convert to Christianity. And so up to this point, the primary religion of the Roman Empire was paganism. I don't know that they had a name for it, but they had a plethora of gods that they worshipped. It's estimated there were about 50 million people in the Roman Empire at this time. and about 7 million Christians. So the church has definitely grown over the last 300 years. Christianity is tolerated in the West and by the West, at this point, the Roman Empire had split. There was the Western Empire centered in Rome and the Eastern Empire centered in Byzantium. And so Christianity is tolerated in the West, but in Byzantium in the East, it's still being persecuted. And the empire was sort of fragmented in its structure of its leadership as well. There are four leaders of the empire at this point. Each half has two people called Augustus and two called Caesar. So Constantine's father was the Augustus of the Western Empire and Constantine is the Caesar of the Western Empire. You could think of that as like president and vice president or something along those lines. And so Constantine as a Caesar was off doing military things and he happened to be leading a military campaign up in Britain. And before a battle known as the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine has a dream or a vision, and he sees the sign of the cross with the sun behind it, and he hears the words, in this sign, conquer. And so he goes out and they fight the Battle of Milvian Bridge and they win. And it was customary for Romans at this time after victory to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods as sort of saying thanks for the victory. Well, Constantine refused. He said, nope, I won this battle because the God of the Christians helped me. So I am now a Christian. pretty quick conversion. And so he then returned back to Rome and legalized, sort of made it official that Christianity was the religion of the Western Roman Empire. Like I said, it had just been tolerated, but now it was part of the empire's religion. He also changed some of the empire laws to reflect this. He made it illegal to do work on Sundays because at this point Christianity recognized Sunday as the Lord's day rather than Saturday as a Sabbath. And so they didn't work on Sundays. Constantine also gave Christian bishops in the Western empire the authority to act as judges for civil cases. So the church and the state are starting to blend a little bit here. In the meantime, over in the Eastern Empire, we have an emperor named Licinius, and he is still persecuting Christians. So Constantine decides, well, I need to defend Christianity. I am the emperor of Christianity. He may have also wanted to be the only emperor of the Roman Empire. So he took his army and marched east to fight with Licinius. And he defeated him and reunited Eastern and Western Rome into a single empire again. And he became the emperor of all of that. At this point, he renamed the city of Byzantium Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul. No, OK, we won't go there. And he made that the new capital of his empire. And so now we have Christianity as sort of the religion of the empire rather than the persecuted religion. A short time after he comes into power, down in the Church of Alexandria, which is one of the major churches down in Egypt, there was a conflict that arose. The conflict was between the bishop, whose name happened to be Alexander, it was not, the city wasn't named after him, different Alexander, and then a man named Arius. And the issue revolved around the deity and the eternality of Jesus. Arius claimed that Jesus was created by God as the first act of creation. The first thing God did was create Jesus. And a lot of people joined Arius in this belief. And so it looked like there was a fight that was about to break out down in the church of Alexandria over this issue. They couldn't seem to reach an agreement, and so they appealed to Constantine. For really the first time we know of, the church went to the political government to solve its issues. I don't know if that was a good thing or not, but Constantine, being a fairly new Christian and not a whole lot of sound doctrine in his conversion, didn't know how to solve this either, didn't know which side was right. But he was wise enough. to listen to the advice of someone else who said, why don't we get all the church leaders together and we'll discuss this as a group. And so he did that. He sent out a summons to all the bishops of the major churches in the empire and they gathered in a town called Nicaea as what would be known as the first ecumenical council of Nicaea. Ecumenical means, if you look on your notes on the back, we've got a definition there, But it means that it's universal, meaning everybody was involved in this. All of the churches were included. And so that makes it an ecumenical council. Whereas there will be other councils, there have been other councils. There was the council of Jerusalem, for example, that we already saw, but it didn't necessarily involve all the churches gathering in Jerusalem. So it wasn't the ecumenical council of Jerusalem. So we have this first ecumenical council and they gathered in Nicaea. We think there were around 300 bishops who gathered for this debate. On one side, we have Alexander and his supporters, which included a young man named Athanasius. We'll talk about him in just a minute. They believed that scripture teaches that Jesus is eternal and has been eternally divine. He is God and has always been God. And then on the other side of the debate, we have Arius and his supporters who believe that God created Jesus. And so the council debated and wrestled with this issue and they studied the Bible and tried to define exactly what the relationship is between God the Father and Jesus. And they came up with four possible explanations. So the first one, the belief that Arian was propagating called Arianism, is the belief that God created Jesus. And this belief still exists today in the Jehovah's Witnesses. They teach and preach that. The second possible option they came up with is, well, there are multiple gods. God is one God, and Jesus is another God, and they've both existed, but they're separate gods. And you and I could be gods too, maybe. What sect would that be? The Mormons, yeah. The third option they came up with is called modalism, or modalism. And it's the belief that there is only one God, and he's only one entity. There isn't a trinity. He just goes by different names. So sometimes he's God the Father, sometimes he's Jesus, sometimes he's the Holy Spirit, depending on what you need him to be. And that today is reflected in groups like the Unitarians and the Oneness Pentecostals. And the fourth option they come up with, the Latin word for it is homoousian, and I'm sure I'm not saying that right, but it's again in your definitions there. That would be the final, sorry. the first definition of those homo, homo, hetero options there. And so homoousion is the idea that God, the Father, and Jesus are of the same substance, but are distinct persons. And this is ultimately what the council decided was the correct answer and is what we believe today. God and Jesus are distinct, but they are both God. And so Constantine and Alexander and Athanasius, they all picked option four. And that was what the council voted on and determined was the answer that the church would support. And so they developed a statement of belief called the Nicene Creed. And they used this word homoousia in the creed to define the existence and the relationship between God and Jesus. that Jesus is eternally divine. He's not a different God, but he's also not the same person as the father. And so everyone present at this council was ordered to sign the creed, because another thing they were trying to do was to unify the churches. We'd seen some division in the last century. It was like, okay, this is what we believe. Let's all get on the same page about this. And your options were sign it or be exiled. Of course, Arius and his supporters refused to sign. And so being from the church in Alexandria, it fell to Bishop Alexander to excommunicate them, which means to put them out of the church or declare them not part of the true church. And so he did just that. The Council of Nicaea also decided on a few other issues. They decided, for example, what date Easter would be celebrated. This was when that was chosen. And so we still celebrate Easter as the Council decided it should be celebrated, or when. Next, they required that all newly elected bishops had to be approved by their neighboring bishops. So we've already seen sort of the handing down from apostle to bishop to bishop. But now we're also getting the neighboring bishops in on this process saying, you know, there are multiple churches, maybe in some of the bigger cities or there are cities close to each other. And we want to make sure that we avoid heresy by having multiple people involved in this confirmation process. And next, and this will be an issue, they decided that an excommunicated person could only be brought back into fellowship with the church by the bishop that excommunicated him. So if I excommunicated somebody, that person couldn't go somewhere else and get brought back into the church. It was only officially that they could be brought back through the person who excommunicated him. And finally, they decided that three cities, Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria, would serve as regional courts for church issues, since the bishops are starting to practice law, thanks to Constantine. And so, from this council and from the result, we really see three major groups that resulted. The first were those who supported and agreed with the council's decision of homo eusia, which is the same. Jesus and God are of the same substance, but different persons. The next group was those who favored a very similar word, homo iusia, which means similar. It's saying God and Jesus are They're similar, they're both gods, but they're not the same person. And then finally was Arius who said, no, they're distinct. God was first and he created Jesus later. And unfortunately the council didn't solve this. These three groups still continued to exist afterwards and continued to fight about it. And this made Constantine mad. He thought that summoning this council, his great plan was going to solve the issue and unify the churches. And so when it didn't, he decided to basically undo what the council had done. He said, okay, at this point, Alexander had died. And this young man, Athanasius is now the Bishop of Alexandria. So it falls to him to bring Arius back into the church. So Constantine orders Athanasius to un-excommunicate Arius and Athanasius refuses. He says, no, this guy's a heretic, we can't bring him back. And so Constantine exiles Athanasius. So now we have the government deciding who the church leaders are and who's allowed to continue and who isn't. And so they picked a new bishop for Alexandria, somebody that they thought would be complacent and do what Constantine ordered. But the day before the new bishop is going to bring Arius back into the church, Constantine dies. Um, and Constantine's son is not, uh, not holding to the same beliefs. Uh, and so the church in Alexandria goes back to fighting, uh, and his son didn't really do anything significant, didn't worry about the church or try to solve these issues. Uh, and then after him, we have the last pagan emperor, um, because beyond this point, all Roman emperors are going to be what we might call holy Roman emperors. They're all going to be Christian, whether they believe it or not. So we have the last guy, his name is Julian the Apostate, because he's the one who's like, no, not Christianity. And so he tries to revive paganism in the Roman Empire and to destroy Christianity again. And so rather than persecute it, he just lets, let the infighting happen. Maybe the Christians will tear themselves down. Thankfully, he also died. And we got a new Christian back into power. And so again, Christianity becomes the main religion of the empire. And the Orthodox group, which would be the, got a definition for you on Orthodox as well, the group conforming to approved doctrine. So the group that agreed with the Nicene Creed starts to win the argument and gain control of the situation. Before we move on to the next topic, I want to look a little bit more in depth at Arianism and try to see how it is that heresies like this one can really be so pervasive in a church, because these are all Christians, people like you and I who claim to believe the Bible. who are believing this stuff, and you wonder, well, where does this come from? So with Arianism, the core problem is they believe that Jesus was created by God. So to see where this idea could come from, I thought, well, let's look at one possible option, the most popular verse in the Bible, John 3, 16. If you have the New King James Version, which I think most of us have memorized, you read or quote John 3.16, it calls Jesus the only begotten son. Not all of our translations have the word begotten, but the original Greek does have a word there. And so it would be easy for us, not that they were studying an English Bible, but to see that and think, okay, begotten, well, what does that mean? Does that mean God made him? Somebody could tell you, yeah, that's what that verse means. And then how do you how do you fight? In fact, this isn't the only place that appears. It's quite a few times in the New Testament. Other times, again, referring to Jesus as the only begotten son, but also referring a few times to parents referring to their only child. But in every case, it seems to be referring to a parent child relationship. So, what do we do with this? Does this tell us that Arian is correct? Is Jesus born or created by God? No? Why not? Alright, let's look at some other verses that might complicate this a little more. Let's stay with John and go to John 1.1. John 1.1 says, In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So John here is telling us the word, which he's going to later show us, that's Jesus. So the word is Jesus was in the beginning with God and is God and all things were created through him. And so at face value right there, it looks like, well, this kind of contradicts John 3.16. Was he begotten or has he always been? And so maybe an Arianist saying, well, these verses can't contradict. So John 1, 1 must be saying that in the beginning means the beginning of time. And Jesus was created first and that started time. And then all of creation came through Jesus. You might say, okay, well, he's the Alpha and the Omega, so that means he was the first created, and that time began with him. You might even argue that John calls Jesus the Word here to tell us that, well, God spoke him into existence. These are all the kinds of arguments an Arian might make, and they're all coming from the Bible. So we have all this apparent support for Arianism coming from the Bible. On the other hand, on the non-Arian side of the argument, if you look at John 1, 1 to 3 at face value, it's pretty easy to argue that, well, maybe the word begotten in John 3, 16 and other places doesn't mean what it seems to mean. Maybe it's referring more to the fact that there's a distinction being made between us as adopted sons of God and Jesus as the son of God, not the adopted son, but rather one who is of the same substance. So how do we know which one of these is the correct interpretation? So far, all we've had is Bible giving us answers. Well, there's a truth and an implication that we have to keep in mind when we're studying the scripture. And the truth is that scripture cannot contradict scripture. And the implication of that is that we must use scripture to correctly interpret scripture. And so far, we haven't really violated this principle with either side of this argument. So we need to continue to search scripture to come to a conclusion here. Thankfully, I don't think we have to go far for this argument. In fact, still within John 1, 1, we see the claim that Jesus is God. This claim of deity is repeated elsewhere in the New Testament as well, both by Jesus himself and by various apostles who testify about him. There's no doubt, or I mean, people argue, but there shouldn't be any doubt if you read your Bible that there are plenty of claims that Jesus is God, he is deity. So what does it mean to be God? Well, to be God, my quick summary here, means to be the supreme being, to be all powerful, self-existent, eternal, and so much more. Which, by definition, if you're the supreme being, you have to be the only one. There can't be multiple gods, because only one of them can be supreme. Any lesser one, then, isn't a god, because they're not supreme. Only one can be self-existent. Only one can be all-powerful, because you have to have power over all the rest. So the definition of a god says there only can be one. So polytheism, for example, can't be true. There can't be multiple gods. The Mormon teaching that we can all become gods can't be true. Satan, thankfully, can never be God. And so if Jesus is God, then he has always been God because to be God is to be eternal. And so he has always existed, which means Arianism cannot be correct. This isn't necessarily the best proof. This is just what came to my mind in continuing to study. There are other things, I'm sure, but it serves as one example. And I hope primarily what I wanted to show with this is why it's important to let all of scripture interpret scripture, not just individual verses. So if some of you are still thinking, well, okay, what about this word begotten? We haven't really addressed that Or I'm not using new King James. My Bible doesn't say begotten Well, let's look at real quick the Greek word just to clear this issue and the word there is monogenes Which if you break it down, I wish I had a whiteboard but mono and genes genes Two pretty common root words. We know what mono is it means one or only and then genes obviously is like genetics same root word there So this word doesn't mean birthed. It does not necessarily mean created. It just means that he's the only one of the same substance, which is the conclusion the Council of Nicaea came to. So that hopefully helps you understand that word a little better, and more importantly, why it's important to study scripture carefully and be wary of heresy that can come from misused scripture. So, all right, moving on to a completely another topic here. I want to talk about saints, because this is something that's starting to become prevalent in the church in this period. We hear, we refer to each other as saints, you know, we are all the saints and we understand that. And then for most of us, I think if you think of someone like St. Augustine or St. Jerome or these others, we think Catholic Church or maybe Eastern Orthodox Church. So what is a saint? According to the wording of the New Testament, which uses this, all Christians are saints. And saint comes from the Latin word sanctus, which means holy or sanctified. All Christians have been sanctified or are being sanctified. We are holy because of Christ's righteousness. But over time, the church is going to stop referring necessarily to everyone in the church as saints, and it's going to start to make a saint a special title for martyrs or other super devoted Christians, maybe those who practice extreme asceticism like we talked about last week. or those who make a significant contribution or bishops or that type of thing. So especially in the Catholic church, we see even special saints and they're called patron saints. And in the Catholic church, there's the practice of praying to the saints instead of to Jesus. So where does this come from? We don't really see it anywhere in the Bible. Jesus definitely never taught us to pray to anyone except directly to God. So to understand how this developed and where it came from, we need to look at the culture of this time period. And so one of the big things about this culture is that people understood all relationships as a hierarchy, like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid, at the top of the social structure, we had the emperor. Under him, we had the Senate, under them, governors, other local regional leaders, then wealthy businessmen, community leaders, fathers as the heads of their households. It was a very structured society. And in this system, if you wanted any kind of special favor, you had to know someone. you couldn't just go to the emperor easily. I mean, we think of Paul appealing to Caesar and it took him years to actually get that audience. And he probably had connections because of who he was. And so in this system, if you wanted to talk to somebody, you needed to, like, say you needed to talk to your governor of your whole region, well, you probably had to bribe your local leader. And then that person might have to bribe somebody to get you to the governor. There was a step process to get to the authority that you needed to talk to. Especially if you wanted to go all the way to the emperor, that would take a lot of money and a lot of connections. And we see hierarchy in heaven as well. We see that God is at the top. He is, as I already said, the supreme being. Under him, we know of a group of angels called archangels. They are higher level angels. And then we have regular angels, and we have saints. The church sort of broke it down. We've got the martyred saints, and then there's regular saints, and the rest of us who are not yet saints, maybe, and so a bit of a hierarchy system here. And so for people in this time period who are used to thinking of relationships in this way, it's natural for them to think of prayer in this way. They didn't think the God of heaven was going to listen to them at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, they thought maybe even God couldn't relate to their needs. Jesus was perfect. What does he understand of my struggles? What does he understand of my sin, of my hunger, of my poverty, whatever it may be? Furthermore, looking back at the Old Testament, a very common belief in this time was to see the God of the Old Testament as a very angry and vengeful God, not a loving and merciful God. So this wasn't somebody they necessarily wanted to put themselves at the mercy of. So they saw the need for a patron. A patron is someone who advocates for you and defends you, somebody who's got better connections than you. In fact, coming from the pagan religion of this day, they had gods for all kinds of things. If you wanted rain, you prayed to the god of rain. If you wanted a new car, you prayed to the god of Ferraris. Corvettes. And so after converting to Christianity, many people still thought in the same way. They thought they needed to pray. First, they needed connections to get to God and they needed specific people who specialized in specific things. And so we get the development of patron saints. They were chosen, some of them for their region. I'm from this region. This was an important saint from our region. I need to pray to him. In other cases, it would be for specific needs. So they thought, you know, this saint struggled with this issue that I'm now struggling with. So I should pray to this saint because they can relate to me and they can bring that need before God. And then we have Mary. Mary became a very popular person to pray to because they thought, well, she's a mother. A mother gets it. A mother empathizes really well. So she's gonna be compassionate and caring and listen to us, but she's the mother of Jesus. So Jesus is going to listen to her. He cares about her. So if I pray to Mary, it's getting to God. So that's where this starts to come from. The church also begins to do what's called venerating saints. We might say they worship them, but the Catholic church makes a distinction between veneration and worship. Well, veneration is okay. Worship is no, you can only worship God, but we can venerate saints. And so to venerate means to honor them after their death, basically by worshiping them. They still do that today, especially with Mary. And so along with this veneration, people also began to seek relics. They thought, again, they're just trying to make connections. They thought, well, if Jesus and the saints might pay more attention to me, if I possess something that used to belong to one of them. So if I'm in the presence of or holding a relic for this saint, that saint is even more connected to me and will listen to me. And so some pretty popular relics. We have pieces of the cross, the crown of thorns, the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin, which was the cloth that Jesus was buried in, the left sandal of Paul, different things like this. These were all relics that people sought and there were an awful lot of forgeries out there because it became a good way to make money off of the Christians. They were seeking these. So what's wrong with all of this? That should go without saying, but let's look at it. So one, the Bible never tells us to pray to anyone except directly to God. Second, we've already just mentioned this, but it's a very wrong view of God. God, even in the Old Testament, is not just the God of anger and vengeance and wrath. He is the same God who is a God of love and mercy. And so they didn't understand this aspect of God very well, that He's full of forgiveness and love. And they didn't understand that when Jesus came to earth, that he was fully human. He did, in fact, experience the same temptations that we do, although without sin. Therefore, he can relate to our needs and things when we pray to him. Second, or third, I guess that was second, it's a wrong view of our relationship to God. This isn't the Old Testament days. We don't have the temple with the holy of holies where only the high priest can enter. When Jesus was crucified and the veil was torn from top to bottom, that opened the way for all of us to approach God directly. Although certainly with fear and reverence still. Finally, not finally, next point, how do the saints hear us? Saints aren't God, and they're not here. They're in heaven. They're not omniscient. They're not omnipotent. We don't necessarily know how how the relationship between heaven and earth works. I think the Bible says that, you know, they're a cloud of witnesses, but I don't know that they necessarily are hearing everything we say, certainly not necessarily all of our prayers. It kind of brings to mind sometimes, or a question I came up with, well, what about our current prayer request system? Is it wrong for us to ask other believers to pray for us? It's not, no, we're supposed to do that. It's part of the one another's, encouraging one another, lifting one another up, praying for one another, very much a part of what we are commanded to do. So that concludes. all of the main part of my notes. We'll go over a few things on the sheets I've handed out to you, just a couple of key points that I think are interesting. First of all, there on the timeline, AD 301, the kingdom at this time of Armenia becomes the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion. So we've gone from persecution to this being a, a very prominent religion. But there is still persecution. We see an emperor there persecuting Christians. And then I want to jump down then to the last point on the timeline. 83, 85, a heretic by the name of Priscillian is executed by the church for heresy. We think this is possibly, probably the first execution performed by the church. I've read my Bible a few times and I haven't seen any verses that give us capital punishment authority. So I don't think the church was on the right track here, but this is something we see happening. And I think this goes along with the civil authority that Constantine handed down to the bishops. And so, well, on the one hand, it seems like a good thing that Constantine converted and Christianity is becoming the dominant religion. There's definitely a negative side to the coin where we see, politics, especially getting involved in the church and the church getting involved in politics and government and not in a good way. All right, let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for this lesson today and for what we can learn from history that you've preserved it for us to study and to hopefully not make the same mistakes that they did. I ask that you would be glorified in the service today that you would speak through will and that our hearts would be ready to hear your word, that you would continue the sanctification process that you've promised, that you would complete it and that you would return soon. Amen.