All right, let's thank the Lord for this day. Dear God and Heavenly Father, we do thank you, Lord, for giving us another day, and a day to come here and to worship you and to be encouraged, to celebrate your advent, and also, Lord, to consider the lives of some of your saints over the years. We ask that you bless this hour and this day. Amen. All right, so we are into what I think is week 11 of faithfulness when the heat is on, biblical and historical look at Christian persecution. So today we're going to look a little bit at less of the didactic and philosophical pieces and just look at some examples. And so here's kind of where we've been. We talked a lot about principles from the Scriptures related to biblical persecution or to Christian persecution, but why we should expect it, how we should respond, what God's plans are in persecution. And now we're going to, for the next couple weeks, move on into a historical overview of some of the different eras of Christianity. And I don't know, Pastor John, is that right? Are you doing Reformation Era next week? So you can, in your mind, you can just cross out that question mark that's on the end of that, so. Today we're gonna talk about the early church, and why, I wonder, are we doing that, right? This is Christmas, we're singing about tidings of comfort and joy, and here we are examining the lives of martyrs. Why does that make sense? Why would you do that? Oh, to be futuristic about it, okay. There is a comfort and a joy to be found in martyrdom, that's true. Other thoughts? Okay, well here's my thought. are surrounded, right, by a cloud of witnesses, as it were. So usually when you hear, hey, we're surrounded, that's bad news. But in our case, right, that's good news, right? So we want to take a look at the lives of some of the saints who have gone before us and seen difficult times. So let's go ahead and press forward, and you'll recognize this from Hebrews 11 and 12. I've skipped all the great things that some of these folks have done and just listed their names here, and I just want to take us on an overview of Hebrews 13. If you've got it, you know, with you, you can look at it, but it ends up calling out these these sort of famous names from the Old Covenant, right? By faith, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses' parents, Moses himself, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, and Samuel, and all these prophets, right? This is a list. who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped from the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight, and then dot dot dot keeps going on, and there's this just huge list of accolades for some of the Old Covenant saints. It's worth reading. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. That's kind of an interesting sentence. They were tortured so that they may rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking, so not just physical torture, So, the writer of Hebrews is setting us up. invoking all these Old Testament faithful witnesses to God, and then says this, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and he's looking back to this Old Testament list of people who are there to be looked at for this purpose, Let us also lay aside every weight and the sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance. Remember that idea of enduring to the end? The race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Right? Jesus will see you through to the end. That's the idea of perfection. For the joy that was set before him. There's that joy, Joel. So I think what you see here is the writer of Hebrews saying, not only do we have this veritable cloud, like that's saying not a few people, but a lot of people, that we can see their stories in the scripture. Not only do we have this cloud of witnesses surrounding us, but we also have this ultimate example of Jesus who endured hostility and that we should use that example to encourage our own hearts so that we do not grow weary or faint-hearted. And so we said, What's this good news here? The good news is we are surrounded, right? There are many examples, not just from the Old Testament, but also we have New Testament examples. We looked at a couple of those over the last few sessions. But there are also a lot of examples, many, many examples, like more than we could talk about, from the era that is right after the apostles are sort of leaving the scene, or at least right after the end of the Book of Acts here. There are many, many examples of faithful allegiance to Christ in the teeth of persecution at and since the time of the apostles. So our goal in the next couple weeks, even though we're talking about comfort and joy and Advent and these things, is to look at some of these saints who have faithfully endured since this time. And we've just picked a few historical eras that make sense to us. And I think that we as modern believers should be encouraged by the faith of those who have gone before us who have, in fact, endured all the way to the end. There is, at bottom, one faith, one Lord that unites us with those Christians back then. There is one church, there is one God, and we are worshiping him in some way, we are united with those who worshipped Him 2,000 years ago. So whether you see worshipping Him in the manger, or in His adult life, or in His resurrection, there are those who have gone before you, and you are by no means alone in that allegiance to Christ. And so I thought what we would do this morning is to confess that faith that we're talking about, this faith that has been not just the last 2,000 years, but the hope of those who are looking forward to the birth of Christ. Let's confess that faith together. So this is the Apostles' Creed. This should be pretty comfortable. Pastor John has something to say. Yes. It's good. So, yeah, John asked me about this last week. I forgot, there's one phrase in here that some people have trouble with, that he descended to hell. Right, so there's these two here, yep. I mean, he did ascend to heaven, certainly, but, so, you know, just want to admit that. Sure. But by and large, this isn't, you know, other than maybe that phrase, you know, if you interpret that as meaning he took on the punishment that we deserve, that's true, but, One of the more comfortably Protestant interpretations there is that Jesus has truly tasted death. It's not as if Jesus sort of went unconscious and wasn't really able to. And not somehow that Christ was only sort of on the surface imitating our death there. So I think that the idea of the confession there is to emphasize the fact that Christ really was human, right? So if you're comfortable, let's confess the faith together. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life of the last. Amen. Amen, right? So this is the faith that those early Christians had to confess, right? They had something basic like this on their minds, even as, say, Stephen is being stoned to death in the book of Acts. It's for this faith that he suffered, for this faith in God, in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so that unites us to them. And so I thought we would take a look at those first couple centuries after the apostles and just look at a few of the interesting stories from that time. Here are some causes that historians have talked about for some of the persecution of Christians in that time. If you go onto the church website, you've got this link here, you can see where I've stolen this from. There are some political causes right early on Christianity, you know, is sort of bad news for established or establishment Judaism, right? So if you're a Pharisee or Sadducee, you're not inclined to like Christians who are coming along and competing for the same religious space. And so you see, for example, that the Sanhedrin and Saul, before he was converted, you know, they're persecuting the church there in Acts 7 and 8. Later on, Jewish persecution would give way to Roman persecution because Christians refused to give unquestioned allegiance to Caesar. There are social causes of persecution as well. Christianity appealed to something like the lower castes who were already despised by the elites, the elites who wouldn't have anything to do with Christianity. And then many of the problems that would come up in Rome over this time that would ultimately lead to the collapse of that society and civilization. They just found it very convenient to blame one group of people. We've seen that even in recent times, right? We've seen that in the last century for sure, right? Just like in, say, Germany, they wanted to blame the Jews for all their problems that they were experiencing here. It was Christians who were scapegoated as the cause of these problems that were leading to the decline of the empire. There were economic causes, so to speak. Christians who didn't participate in Roman religion were, in effect, taking money out of the hands of the priests involved in it, or those who were making and selling idols, or those who were telling fortunes. So a reticence to participate in that economy, right, is something that sort of made Christians weird, easily singled out. And then, of course, there are genuine religious causes, right? So there were times when it was compulsory to burn incense on some of the altars in Rome once a year in order to show not only allegiance to Caesar, but also a sense that you confessed him to be divine. Christians were also accused of incest and cannibalism because the idea of greeting each other with a holy kiss or taking the Lord's Supper, eating his body. These things were misunderstood by the Romans, so there seems to have been a genuine misunderstanding there. certainly it was kind of a different religion in the sense that the Roman religious observance was, you know, maybe not even based on an internal reality, but based on an external and visible participation in established religion, and then compartmentalized away from a true inner life of the heart in such a way that it was mostly about being seen. And yet, here come these believers and their faith in Christ is wholly life-integrated and that devotion is internal and it's not showy. And so, believers at that time were even perceived as being irreligious or atheistic because they weren't participating in this visible external Roman system. And then finally, Christianity being wholly life-integrated And sort of worldview changing, right? That worldview ends up colliding with some of the Greek and later Roman kind of philosophies of the day. So Stoicism, for example. There were emperors in Rome who were Stoics and persecuted Christians on the basis of them not being Stoics. So overall, there's just a few causes here. We said economic, religious, social, and political, right? If you want to read more, there's a great article. You can see these notes online when I get around to posting them. OK. Thoughts before we move on? Hey, Andy. I think now, at least in their culture, the persecution is really from within. that the church doesn't kind of persecute itself and that they don't believe what they think they believe. They don't have to have persecution from outside because we kind of persecute ourselves. That's an interesting point. So what Andy said is that today, at least in the West or in America, we see the church sort of persecuting itself from within to some degree, or at least the visible church does that because, you know, maybe at this time in the early church, there's not a whole lot of people, you know, who are born into the church since it's a new thing, right? They're not persecuting themselves from within, but maybe in our time we have some who are. Pastor John? Can you go back a slide? Yep. So when you look at this, and I think we're going to see this as being common as we look at all the different examples, you know, a lot of this was very much kind of also misunderstanding, sort of wrong thoughts about the intents of Christians and those kinds of things. Not that everything is, but But the second bullet there is completely off base. The reality is Christians were part of the problem. If anything, they were part of the solution. But there's just a lot of misunderstanding in it. So as believers, I think part of what we need to take from this is that We shouldn't expect society to understand us correctly. They're going to misinterpret things. They're going to think wrong motives of us that aren't true. And that's just what happens historically. So we shouldn't be surprised when we're sort of mischaracterized in that way. Let's go ahead and use that lapel, and then if I can grab this, I will have it right here. Okay, so let's just take a quick look at the Apostles, for example. You know, the Apostles, by and large, did not live into their twilight years. You have Peter crucified upside down in Rome. Scott, I picked this out for you, by the way, this painting. So, who's that by, Scott? There you go. If you want to know a little bit about Caravaggio, talk to Scott after the service. So Peter crucified upside down. Andrew crucified. James, the apostle that we've been talking about in the morning service, was beheaded. Philip was hanged. Bartholomew was flayed alive and then beheaded in a grotesque manner. Matthew We just know that he was martyred. Thomas was speared to death. James the Last was crucified. Judas not Iscariot was shot to death with arrows. And Simon the Zealot was also crucified. And so the only apostle that seems to really escape here from a pretty gruesome end is John who winds up exiled and in some traditions also ends up being martyred as well. Right, Fox's Book of the Martyrs is a good read, Andy says. All right, so here's just the very first, you know, this is the time when these men are sort of the main disciples of Christ and, you know, before too long, before the end of the first century, many of them are martyrs. During that time, right at the end of the Book of Acts, we can see sort of the first major persecution getting started, and it comes and goes, it's intermittent, and in that time you certainly see sort of more of an emphasis on persecution of Christians by the Jewish religious establishments, and eventually it shifts over to being more Roman. The first major emperor to undertake a fairly concerted campaign of persecution is Herod Agrippa. He had, or I shouldn't say he had, but during this time anyway, the Apostle James is beheaded. And then Nero comes to power. If you've heard good things about Nero, just raise your hand. I didn't think so. No one seems to remember Nero very favorably. Of course, famously during his time as emperor, Rome burns and there's sort of this rumor going around that Nero started that blaze in order to pave the way for new architecture. And so in order to get that blame off of himself, Nero blames Christians, and this is the time when the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul are traditionally most likely martyred, is during this persecution. You don't know that with great certainty, but this is one of the scholarly theories that has a lot of traction. Later persecutions, you can see after Nero leaves the scene, maybe there's a scene, there's a time that's a little bit less intense, but here comes Domitian in the 90s, and Christians who are refusing to make sacrifices of incense to Caesar are in a lot of cases executed. We have the Apostle John, like I said, exiled to Patmos. Timothy is beaten severely with clubs and he doesn't survive. Then right on the tail of Domitian comes Trajan and this is a very intense period of persecution. This is the time when Rome reaches its largest extent, and so there's sort of some patriotism involved with that. Christians are seen as being sort of anti-patriotic, not particularly patriotic or involved in Roman life, and so their persecution, as well as others like that, is done under the idea of calling them traitors. And then during the most intense period of persecution, and this is like. 20 years worth of persecution, right? This is a significant amount of time. Christians who were discovered were typically executed, at least in the center parts of the empire. It's during this time that you start to see the various bishops or pastors over major cities being arrested. And so, In major cities such as Antioch, right, we have Ignatius, and he is most likely a disciple of the Apostle John, and he is arrested and taken from Antioch to Rome. There's a great article on Nazarene God about that, and traditionally is set to fight hungry lions in the Colosseum and dies in the Roman Colosseum. Moreover, after the death of Peter, you have other faithful men coming to replace him. One of these is Clement, and he was sort of the, I don't want to call it teaching pastor or executive pastor or whatever in Rome. He's sort of the very prominent pastor in Rome over the Roman church, and he's killed as well, traditionally. Right on the tail here of Trajan, 117, new emperor Hadrian discontinues those same policies and that's another 21 years. So now you're talking like a 40 year period of extremely intense persecution. After the death of Hadrian, there's a little bit of a break, but pretty soon you have Antoninus Pius comes to power. And once again, the policy of finding these pastors, this case, Polycarp, who has just a name that I've always been like, I wonder who's brave enough to name their son Polycarp. Polycarp, he was a pastor in Smyrna. Probably a disciple of John, burned alive and then stabbed in the midst of it. Not long after that, Marcus Aurelius, and I believe Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic. And so I had some philosophical objections to Christianity. Not surprisingly, Christian philosophers didn't particularly win favor with him. So you have Justin Martyr, who gets his last name for obvious reasons. He was sort of an early Christian apologist and philosopher, and he was denounced and beheaded during this time. And so now we're talking, wow, it's been sort of 100 years since that persecution that started with the stoning of Stephen, and it's still this thing that's happening. On into the third century here, and another emperor comes to power. You can see there's sort of a break here, but under Septimus Severus, conversion to Christianity is punishable by execution. That's it, right? There's not really any wiggle room in that policy. After him, there's a series of emperors, and the empire is kind of getting less stable, and at some point they start assassinating each other, and so Maximus Thrax assassinates Severus Alexander, who was largely supported by Christians because he was a little bit less intense in the denouncing Christians departments. And so what happens under Maximus Thrax is that he just orders the blanket execution of all Christian clergy, right? You're a priest, you're dead. That's the policy of Maximus Thrax. Under Decius, you know, the decline of Rome is sort of obvious to all who live there. The size is shrinking. There are attacks from without that are challenging the Roman way of life. So what begins to become common is that there are these sort of tests of loyalty that you need to profess your allegiance to the emperor. We need to know that you're a patriot, that you're a good citizen. And so one of these was that you would offer a pinch of incense to the emperor once a year in a way that would definitely constitute worship, and Christians could not, would not, did not participate in that in many cases. It's not universal, there's a whole story there, but in many cases Christians were prisoners of conscience, would not do it, and so in some cases were killed for being unpatriotic. Something really unfortunate happens here. In 249, a plague breaks out, and there's a guy named Cyprian who, because of his writings, we know about this plague, and so it's called the Plague of Cyprian. And Emperor Odysseus believes that the reason why that there's a plague is because the gods are punishing Rome for the Christians not worshiping him. So talk about colossal arrogance, right? You're not worshipping me, therefore we're all dying, and so what I'm going to do is persecute you to death. Sounds like a great guy. Stellar roommate, right? Anyway, persecution under Decius is exceptionally severe and absolutely universal. Over the years as persecution went from the policy of one emperor to the next, maybe it's a little more local. Maybe it's a little bit more intense here, and maybe you can flee more. to relative safety somewhere else. But during this time, it is absolutely universal policy in the Roman Empire to persecute Christians. So maybe you've heard of this man, Origen, theologian. He was tortured for two years to make him renounce Christ, and he did not. And after two years of nearly continual torture, he was released, but that time of torture was so severe that eventually he just died. Emperors come and go, and so here we have Valerian. Christians were forbidden to assemble, and any property they owned was confiscated by the state. So it's not just, hey, we seek your life, and so maybe there are some people in the society who say, you know, I don't think my Christian friends deserve to die, so I'll help them. Well, if all they're doing is confiscating all their property and not letting them assemble, then, you know, maybe there's not as much help. I don't know. But certainly under this emperor, to be a Christian is to probably be very poor and relatively alone. There was another prominent pastor in Rome, Sixtus, who was beheaded, and there were deacons in his church that were executed the next day. In Carthage, there's this man, Cyprian, or Cyprianus, and he is beheaded, martyred along with eight of his disciples, or eight deacons, something like that. And remarkably, so this is the same Cyprian who who, from whom we know about this plague that happened earlier. And because of Cyprian and the emphasis on history in Carthage, there's actually an official Roman record that survives from the trial of Cyprian. So here is Cyprian. This is Galerius Maximus. It's not the same Galerius that we talked about earlier. And go ahead and let's switch mics here. Is this on? Check. So there's this record that survives. Glarius Maximus says to his prisoner, are you Thastius Cyprianus? Cyprian says, I am. And Glarius says, the most sacred emperors have commanded you to conform to the Roman rights. So what is being demanded here is you need to worship the Roman gods and the emperor the way that you are expected to do. Antiprian just says, I refuse. So Galerius, apparently there's a brief pause and they have a council and Galerius says this. You have long lived an irreligious life, okay, and this is not exactly true, but from the Roman perspective, this is how they perceive Christians. You have long lived an irreligious life and professed yourself an open enemy to the gods and the religion of Rome and the emperors. You shall be made an example to those whom you have wickedly associated with you. The authority of law shall be ratified in your blood. And it is the sentence of this court that Thasya Cyprianus be executed with a sword. To which Cyprian only said, Thanks be to God. So after that particularly intense bit of persecution, there's a little bit of a lift coming. So we don't see it just yet. Diocletian comes to power. It's short-lived. But once again, sacrifices to the gods are mandatory. This is something that we've seen. Obviously Cyprian was martyred over this. Persecution of Christians is extremely acute. Churches are being destroyed, scriptures are being burned, and all the civil rights of Christians as citizens are suspended. But eventually, Diocletian abdicates the emperorship, and Galerius, different Galerius, comes to power. And under Galerius, we go in 10 short years from an extremely acute period of persecution to an edict of toleration where Christians and other religious groups are allowed to live and worship at liberty. And at this time, the empire is not as large as it once was, but something like 5 to 15% of the people living in it are Christians. And this is after 250 years of very extreme in some cases persecution. So there's something like four million Christians living in the Roman Empire in the early part of the fourth century here. And I couldn't resist and I thought, well, I'm going to do some math and all of you math people are going to come to me and tell me I did it wrong afterwards. I know because there's something I didn't include. But a very, very, very basic first order math here uh... you know how many people were becoming christians every day in order for this to happen let's say at the end of let's let's say uh... you know at after the resurrection of christ and he appears to five hundred people at once let's just say that's let's just say there's five hundred christians how many people are becoming christians every day in order to get to the point where four million people are christians in two hundred sixty years And it turns out that the rate of disciple-making is something like one convert every 10 to 15 years per believer, right? So if you have that one friend who you're witnessing to and it doesn't seem to be going particularly well, I'm never going to change the world this way. I'm never going to make an impact for Christ. Well, these Christians did, and it didn't necessarily happen rapidly. So something else begins to happen here. One of the emperors is converted to Christianity, and he puts out the Edict of Milan, which again, you're talking 10 years earlier, things were extremely acute. And now, toleration of Christianity is becoming permanently established. And even later, Christianity becomes the official religion of the empire. And so there really was quite a bit of change in these centuries from Christianity being the religion of the scum of the earth to being the official religion of the empire. So here's another famous dead theologian that you can add to your list of favorites. So Tertullian, which I can only imagine, if your name is Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, do you tell people, yeah, but my friends all call me Tertullian for short. It's a long name. I don't know why. They do things differently in the past, I guess. But anyway, his famous quote, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. And so what you can see is simultaneously with this time of very acute persecution, very intense time to be a believer, the church is growing. The kingdom of God is prevailing against the gates of hell so to speak right the gates of hell are not prevailing it's a church of the way around why and it's because god is absolutely sovereign in his uh... over his creation is actually working to bring about his purposes he said this week uh... week after week in the we see it here in history that as god uh... said or that as you said uh... the gates of hell will not prevail against the church and it's true The Roman Empire is gone, but the disciples of Christ are still here. And so I thought we would end with this encouragement from Revelation where Speaking to the churches here in Revelation 2, you see this, the end, will not be hurt by the second death. And so the encouragement here is that there are those who will see the second death and there are those who won't, right? And it's those who are being, even in the midst of the time that this is written, persecuted, have no reason to fear hell or God's judgments, but those who are doing the persecution do have cause to be afraid. And so Even these martyrs of that time have a crown when they appear before God in heaven. So I hope that you are encouraged from these stories of faithful people over The first few centuries of the church, it was not an easy time to be a believer. I'm not saying that being a believer today is just, I don't know, like a frolic through the fields of lilies or anything like that. It's not. We still see difficult times, but... So have many, many, many other faithful saints who confess the same faith. And so Christian, I would, I would say there is great reason to be encouraged. Uh, not only is God on your side, so to speak, but you are surrounded by a very great cloud of witnesses from the old Testament, from the new Testament, and from the time since then, um, that faithfulness to Christ, uh, is, is possible to the end. All right. We're pretty much out of time, but if there's any comments to be made, we'll do it briefly. Some of you are thinking, Merry Christmas, right? I know, right? Brian? Yeah, I just had one thought. In terms of going through all the history of Rome, if you've never read The City of God by Augustine, Augustine argues a lot that, you know, look at how Rome was blamed to Christians for this and this and this. And then he basically makes the argument, no, look what Christians did while all this was happening. And so he's refuting some of the arguments of the day or minds of the day. I think it's helpful reading. It's a big book, but it's a good read. So you're recommending City of God by Augustine? Okay. All right. Well, let's pray then. Dear God and Heavenly Father, I thank you again for these encouragements, Lord, some from scripture and some from history. Lord, we pray that we would be, in a sense, worthy successors to these men and women who gave their lives to be faithful to you. Lord, we never prayed that you would make us martyrs, but we do pray, God, that you would give us the faith of the martyrs to be faithful to you to the end. Again, Lord, whether that's very comfortable or very uncomfortable. So Lord, we pray that you would give us the faith that endures. Lord, we pray that you would be shaping us here this morning as we come to worship you. That you would be planting your truth down deep inside of our hearts. that we would see you for who you are, that we would see you as being supremely valuable, that we would see you as being worth even martyrdom. And Lord, we pray that you would be a comfort to those who in this day are not not sure whether they will Escape martyrdom and there are many in the globe today and where we pray that you would be a comfort to them Lord we pray that you would bless the hearing of your word today and That it would be to the praise of your glory Pray these things in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen